Xavier Becerra as California Attorney GeneralLittle Sisters of the Poor on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2016.
Let’s face it, “fact-checking” radiates from the same noxious fever swamp of ideological zealotry that dominates most newsrooms in Big Media. An example is the herd of “fact-checkers” rushing to defend Xavier Becerra’s verbal gymnastics in yesterday’s (2/25/2021) confirmation hearing to hide the fact that he assiduously worked to force religious charities into sinning. With a straight face he said,
“I have never sued the nuns, any nuns. I’ve never sued any affiliation of nuns, and my actions have always been directed at the federal agencies.”
Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post
And with an equally straight face, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Salvador Rizzo, came to the demagogue’s defense: “It’s misleading to say Becerra sued the nuns . . . . the California attorney general has not filed lawsuits or brought enforcement actions against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a charity run by Catholic nuns.”
The Sacramento Bee chimed in as if the two newsrooms were working off each other’s Twitter feed. This vaunted exemplar of truth in the fourth estate bellowed that Becerra “did target a federal government exemption”, not a specific group. Then, the clowns went on to smear Sen. Ben Sasse’s assessment of the obvious as “misleading”. If this was a football game, the WaPO and SacBee were the pulling guards for a wide sweep left.
Kate Irby, Sacramento Bee fact-checker
The vast majority of today’s journalists aren’t referees; they are huddling with one team. Their team was caught with a teammate who wanted to coerce not just one group of nuns but every church and denomination with traditional morality and a calling to help the needy. To be clear, Becerra did target the nuns (Little Sisters of the Poor), and nearly every tithe-paying Christian, Muslim, Jew, and pagan.
Becerra began the feud in 2017 when he couldn’t tolerate the fact that many established churches have beliefs that he decreed shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of Obama’s edict in Obamacare that everyone, including nuns, provide birth control and abortifacients in their health coverage, a sin for them and many other people of faith. For Becerra, if they don’t cooperate, they must be made to cooperate. Trump saw the injustice in this authoritarian act and granted religious exemptions. Becerra, as the not-so-Golden State’s AG, sued the Trump administration (one of 100 lawsuits in his personal jihad against Trump) in a case that appeared in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as California v. Little Sisters of the Poor.
So, it’s worse than an assault on one faith group. The commissar wanted to force all of them into perdition, or get entirely out of Christ’s mission to help the needy.
Becerra’s verbal slight-of-hand reaches right up there into the highest ranks of public buffoonery. Earlier, his comrade, Sen. Alex Padilla, came to the defense of his fellow California revolutionary by invoking the race card in his gambit to one-up Becerra in tomfoolery. The race card is a pity card. He sat next Becerra to invoke pity for the times that he and Becerra were the only Latinos in the room. What? What’s that got to do with handing over control of the nation’s healthcare to a lefty zealot? A person’s high level of melanin doesn’t inoculate the person from foolishness. One can be Latino, Anglo, Asian, Black, a man or woman, gay or straight, and a man-one-day-but-a-woman-the-next, and still be stupid.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D, Ca,), foreground, and Xavier Becerra behind the mask in yesterday’s confirmation hearings.
“Fact-checking”, and much the rest of the fourth estate, can no more be trusted than the race-hustlers seeking a promotion at taxpayer expense, like Becerra. Our public discourse more resembles the babblings of an asylum than the interactions of mature adults. The problem: others around the world are watching the madness. What a sobering thought.
Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.
Visage of Big Brother on the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s “1984″.
The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.
This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.
There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).
The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.
If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.
Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.
Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.
Insurrection: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. It is a violent revolt against an oppressive authority. Insurrection is different from riots and offenses connected with mob violence. (USLegal Dictionary at definitions.uslegal.com)
Miriam-Webster definition of “insurrection”: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Synonyms include rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, mutiny.
The word “insurrection” is crossing the lips and keyboards of more and more of the entrenched and telegenic punditry in the increasingly and ideologically monolithic chattering classes. Why? Why this particular word choice? One possible answer lies with the desire to expunge dissent without having to deal with the heretics to the emerging group mind. It’s happening as I write.
Add government power to monolithic control over expression and you come close to the adjective “Orwellian” (as in George Orwell, as in “1984”). Orwell’s dystopia could quickly become ours.
Speaking of “triggering”, the January 6 event is the trip wire for using “insurrection” in a form of word manipulation to enforce ideological conformity. A mob breaks into the capitol and suddenly it’s an attempted coup. A “mob” is instantly translated into “insurrectionists”; “riot” is consonant with “revolt”; and “mayhem” is converted into “treason” – and this after a summer of BLM and Antifa rioting in cities across America. None of the word pairings connote anything nice but they are useful if the goal is to advance a monopoly of power to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.
January 6 protest on Capitol steps.
If it was anything, the January 6 episode was a brawl and not an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. The malefactors were not anything like the Bolsheviks planning their October 1917 coup in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute. There was little if any orchestration, even though a few were clearly bent on violence. There was more coordination among BLM and Antifa hoodlums in Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, New York City, and LA than the followers of chief war paint (Jake Angeli) in his buffalo headdress milling around the Senate chambers. He’ll get the book thrown at him while BLM thugs get kneeling gestures, incoherent defenses, and donations to their defense funds. It’s preposterous.
Democrats, let’s drop the preening on a contrived moral high ground. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see. Cutting to the quick, the guilty deserve a fair punishment . . . and leave the rest of us alone.
Something more insidious is afoot. The concentration of troops in the capitol resembles Gen. Schwarzkopf’s massing of forces for his famous “left hook” to decimate the Iraqi army in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why the show of force for an inauguration? I suspect that it’s much more than protection. It’s a visible reminder in order to paint the millions of dissenting Americans as moral outlaws. Some of the troops showing up in DC were indoctrinated with fears of “white supremacists” in scenes reminiscent of the brainwashing given to Red Chinese troops before they stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989. Will the National Guardsmen be given live ammunition also? And all this after the ruling party issued broad stand-down orders this summer in many of our major cities so they could be left to burn. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see.
Is this appropriate in a citizen republic?
If you’ll recall, Inauguration Day 2017 was treated remarkably different by our media oligarchs. Remember the Women’s March and the cries of “Me Too”, some speakers describing dreams of blowing up the White House? The next three years treated America to disclosures of a similarly aligned administrative state conniving to deprive a candidate of the office that he fairly won, and then embroil his presidency in stonewalling and impeachment. Some donkey party mouths, like Maxine Waters, called for public abuse and incivility for officeholders of the other party. Where was the outrage back then?
The Democrats of today’s social-revolutionary Democratic Party are sitting atop a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling. Their agenda is simply too repugnant to a huge block of the American public. The situation has gone beyond a mere difference of opinion. When one side sees the other side as a threat, all bets are off. The ruling party’s platform is so extreme that a softening of the edges will placate few. I’m very fearful that an already unhinged fringe will resort to more extreme forms of opposition as an answer to an extreme agenda.
So, playing with words is playing with minds, but it also is playing with fire. Please, Biden and company, don’t stoke it. Please, the unhinged among the dissenters, don’t head to the arsenals. Find other means to express your discord. For the rest of us in the opposition party, get organized to do to Schumer/Pelosi/Biden and company what they did to McConnel/Trump and company for all of Trump’s term. And by all means, exploit the scandalous mail-in voting system to the hilt.
Come to think of it, we’d all be better off if the social-revolutionary party scrapped the revolutionary laundry list and for cooler heads to prevail. Sounds good to me. Anyway, I wonder how many people actually voted for a socialist revolution? I suspect few, very few.
Leni Riefenstahl at work in the filming of “Triumph of the Will”. Apple commercial that appeared on Jan. 11, 2021 during the NCAA College Football championship telecast,
*monoculture: noun; in agriculture, monoculture is the practice where a single crop, livestock species, or plant of one species that are genetically uniform at a time.
The term “monoculture” need not be limited to agriculture. It accurately applies to us and our time. It also has regurgitated throughout history. 1935 was the year of release for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party about the 1934 Nuremburg rally (see it here with some commentary). Modern tyrannies seek to impose a uniform mind, a monoculture of thought if you will, and they have a plethora of media technologies to assist them like film and today’s Big Tech media tentacles. In 1935, the Party sought to implant the purity of the “kulture” of the German “volk”, and the Party and its Leader as the embodiment of it, as a pretext for mammoth social engineering that would lead, among other things, to the squashing of all dissent and eventually the Holocaust. Riefenstahl’s film was part of the program to further the goal of creating a Teutonic version of Rousseau’s General Will, a “will” that will not tolerate opposing views. It is happening to us, as I write, across a broad front of armies of sycophants under the command of powerful corporate boardrooms, ad agencies, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Entertainment, Big Sports (NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB), etc.
Scenes of Star Trek’s Borg.
We see the singular message everywhere from athletes’ helmets to streaming services, the networks, and commercials (like the one below). It’s a simple message: America is an oppressive society. It’s a very pernicious idea that has nothing behind it but rank repetition in our media-saturated world. The idea lies around like a loaded gun on a table in the memorable words of Justice Robert Jackson in his famous dissent in Korematsu, the 1944 Court decision that sanctioned the internment of Japanese-Americans during the WWII. He wrote that the Court in its majority opinion had “for all time…validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Today, the monoculture that dominates our cultural commanding heights is the “hand” ready to inflict on the country the loaded gun of a racial jihad and reverse Jim Crow.
Japanese-American internment camp, WWII.Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, one of 3 dissenters in Korematsu v. United States, 1944.
The real targets of the monoculture’s purveyors are anyone who doesn’t accept the idea. Those enemies of the monoculture’s “will” were neatly summed up in Hillary Clinton’s words from 2016: “… you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” The tactic involves permanently branding your opponents through control of the media and endlessly repeating the slander. It’s happening right now.
It occurs when Big Tech “depltaforms” people and goes after Parler. Everyone else gets the message after a few scalps.
Look at the not-so-subtle messaging in the Apple commercial from last night’s college football telecast (see below). With a driving beat in the background, the voice-over childishly opines that “There’s a certain kind of person who won’t take no for an answer. They don’t walk in quietly. They parade in . . . status-quo breaking.” And what status quo are they breaking? Look to the placards on the wall or on a t-shirt. “Racism” and “Me Too” define that status quo: America, the racist and sexist pig. The whole ad was an incitement to bellow against “systemic” . . . anything, like the contrived-but-useful -isms or -phobias.
This is rank mental conditioning from a shallow crust at the top of our societal pyramid. The crust is not just socially shallow – a small percentage of the population living in exclusive isolation from the rest of us – but cognitively. All that they complain about are singular incidents that may or may not reflect an evil -ism, or is reliant on the numerical hocus-pocus of “statistical disparity”. The numbers may shed light on a problem, but they say next to nothing about causation. Why do African-Americans disproportionately show up in violent crime statistics? Is it because an entire system of police officers – black, white, Asian, Latino, men, women, et al – have it in for blacks? Or could it be the disproportionate presence of certain social conditions in our black communities that explain the disparity? Well, if your mental reflex is to hate America, then the “system” is your target of choice. Now, that’s a tall order – to tinker with an entire way of life – but it’s the one robust enough to justify great power for our power-seeking utopian busybodies.
Will half the country acquiesce to Big Brother’s message? Will they accept the grand social engineering crusade that will be in store for them? My guess is “No”. Deep cultural fissures already exist and the monoculture’s efforts to smash dissent will only exacerbate them. No amount of woke proselytizing by Big Tech and Big Media in their own versions of the “Triumph of the Will” will make dissenters conform.
Two brothers from Ohio at a 2018 Trump rally wearing t-shirts that said, “I’d Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat.”
A cold civil war seems likely. I just hope and pray it won’t turn hot. It all depends on how provocative the cultural Left pushes their project of smothering those who demur. Beware Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media, you may find yourself deplatformed by half the country.
Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of America’s greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it . . . if cooler heads don’t prevail.
From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. They’ve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting “voter suppression” to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.
Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You don’t have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic “D”, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when you’re harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.
Voters drop off their presidential primary mail-in ballots at a drop box at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.
Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abrams’s vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today aren’t robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.
A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.
And of course, there’s Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of “acceptable” thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.
The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit – some mainline ones already have – the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.
Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.
I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.
Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.
The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.
I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.
If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.
For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.
Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.
Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.
The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.
RogerG
**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.
What’s happening to America? I have much reason to be worried about the soundness of popular thinking on some very weighty issues if an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report on the state of public opinion post-election has any validity. My concern isn’t due to the findings running counter to my opinions. It’s my suspicion – call it an informed suspicion – that there is little awareness of a counter point of view, or much of anything else for that matter. We appear to be well-connected but poorly informed, maybe predominantly non-informed.
Perhaps we have always been this way to a significant degree. Perhaps. But what of all that talk about our “great schools” and vibrant free press? Honestly, that “free press” isn’t so much “free” as it is monotone, at least for the big shots. As for the schooling, never before has so many Americans spent more years behind a desk and come out of it with so little. The prerequisites for sound reasoning are quickly disappearing. Our scandalous press has been much written about, so little need to go there. But what of our schools? The only real snapshot of learning attainment is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP). We are forever exhorted to spend more, trillions more, but are getting less and less. Reading and Math proficiency scores have plummeted from 2017 to 2019 (pre-pandemic): Reading fell from 40% to 34% and Math from 37% to 34%.
And what of those other subjects, like those that contribute to cultural literacy? Could our graduating seniors pass a citizenship test? Call me skeptical given the state of the other subjects.
Money, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem. Something more fundamental is afoot. Are we a healthy society? Is the infrastructure for the schools – college preparation, grad school teacher-training, curricular materials such as textbooks, etc. – healthy? They are festooned with a rigorless leftist ideology, wokeness run amok.
And let’s pull the rug back on our commonly chaotic homes. Now there’s a new normal for you.
No wonder according to AEI, 60+% expressed hostility to the Electoral College. I’ll bet that most don’t understand it and the Founder’s complex reasoning for it. This is a discussion in a vacuum, and a poll result coming out of the vacuum.
Groupthink
The sudden popularity of marijuana is another thing. Let’s strip the debate of the much-ballyhooed medical benefits and get real. This is about getting high, and not much else. The popularity of weed has been on the upswing for at least a couple of generations, as getting high has made a comeback. As these young adherents pass through the age pyramid, they tow along with them the residue of their younger escapades. This might help account for the jump of 22% for legalization in the AEI analysis.
Combine the corrupted education with the increasing frivolity of our new techie world and we get the idea in polls that Biden will unite the country. Where’d that come from? Biden spent all summer threatening many of our jobs and imposing on us the semi-literate musings of a few half-wits in Congress. Unite the country by foisting on us over-complicated junk like hybrids, by having us grow more accustomed to intermittent blackouts and expensive energy, by having fewer guys and gals with guns and more overpaid Sociology majors patrolling our neighborhoods, by Soros-funded DA’s not enforcing the laws and emptying the jails, by freezing your kids out of college slots to benefit other upper middle-class kids who check the right identity boxes, by hiking taxes on job creators, by open-borders caterwauling . . . . ?
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gets ready to begin her first State of the State address with Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist standing by. (photo: Casey Hull)
This isn’t the stuff of a “uniter”. The whole scheme is based on division and a smear: a parceling out of blame to one group and government bennies to categorical favorites. And then there’s the view in the poll that Biden will do better with COVID. Once again, where’d that come from? Biden is frozen in March 2020 when we didn’t know anything. He wants to double down on stupid. Measures such as lockdowns, school closures, and having us masked-up everywhere at nearly all times may have been appropriate when COVID-knowledge was a blank slate. Now we know a lot more about who is vulnerable (very few), the nature of the bug, and how to treat it. Instead of targeting efforts on the truly vulnerable, Biden and company wants to bring back totalitarianism, the kind of thing that failed at preventing our current second surge. Yeah, doubling down on stupid.
The polling analysis by AEI doesn’t say nearly as much about public opinion as it does about the condition of the minds behind those broader set of opinions. I think that it was Will Rogers who said, “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s so dangerous. It’s what he knows that ain’t so.” Chew on that.
Hugh Hewitt’s radio program is a treasure. I savor his demeanor and interviews of all stripes of opinion-makers. However, his take on the two most important issues of today – the election and pandemic – drives me up the wall. He’s certainly not alone in his display of tunnel vision on these two matters.
Friday, while interviewing Steve Kornacki, NBC’s resident expert on polling, they both strayed into superficial comparisons of the 2020 election with previous ones. Right off the bat, it must be admitted that this election was like no other and hardly analogous. It’s the first election in my memory that a huge bulk, if not the majority, of the ballots cannot be assigned to particular living, breathing, and eligible voters with much certainty. Ballots were shot-gunned to buildings throughout the country, were taken inside, and nobody can legitimately vouch for each ballot’s treatment after that. It’s the exact opposite of the level of security when voting in-person. This election was strange, really strange. How is a comparison with previous elections even possible?
Kornacki blithely tries to do just that with Hewitt in tow. Kornacki cited the increasing urbanization of Georgia and the demographic dominance of the counties within the orbit of greater Atlanta, counties that Hillary won by 30% and Biden wins by 40%, to help explain Biden’s razor thin victory in the state. I’m not convinced the fact has much relevance. Demographic changes don’t occur at the speed of flipping a light switch, even though they are gradually happening in real time. Four years isn’t long enough for that factor to account for a change of 10%.
How can anyone brusquely brush off the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime loosey-goosey election system accounting for the surge in Biden support? Kornacki and Hewitt might be suffering from glaucoma.
Hewitt would probably respond by saying that there’s no evidence of substantial fraud . . . but fraud is beside the point. He sees most issues as a lawyer would, which he is, in clinging to his conclusion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to throw aspersions on the result. He’s right if all matters must meet the standards of jurisprudence, but that’s a rarified environment involving unique standards. For real people living in the real word, we can’t conduct our lives by measuring all that we do to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We must act on what is likely to be true.
Evidentiary norms of the courtroom are ill-suited for policy making, decisions about your child’s education, and assessing an election system that incorporated what would have been considered fraud just two years before. The system hid voting behind walls – addresses – and counting procedures that poured ballots into huge anonymous piles like a rain drop landing in a pond. The system legitimized fraud and made it next to impossible to uncover the misbehavior in “sufficient” quantities.
Indeed, this Rube Goldberg election system was a disgrace. Party activists, greased with wads of lefty billionaire cash, became the principle means for distributing the ballots as they scurried to deliver and gather absentee ballot applications from their favorite constituencies, and became the principle means for their collection in legal and “questionable” ballot harvesting operations. Vote-by-mail essentially codified scandalous conduct.
The election was a system with few, if any, authenticity checks. You can’t expect underpaid and overworked poll workers to instantly become forensic handwriting experts. This election became a race to garner the biggest pile of paper, not necessarily voters, because the system was set up to place a premium on paper, not bodies. Under these conditions, paper is made easier to pile than bodies.
Mail-in ballots being prepared for counting. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)
Simply put, you can’t correlate each piece of paper with a live body. A leap of faith is required to overcome that problem. Hewitt and Kornacki are unknowingly mired in something akin to a religious act.
And then there’s Hewitt’s stand on the pandemic. He announced that Gov. Newsom “is doing his best” and implored public officials like LA’s Mayor Garcetti to cordially ask the population “to endure just 3 more months of restrictions”. Au contraire, Newsom and Garcetti are deserving of condemnation not compliments and supplications to be nicer.
We’re in the midst of the much-anticipated second surge and many in power act as if they haven’t learned a darn thing. We now know that the truly vulnerable are a narrow slice of the population: the aged with serious health problems. Outside of that demographic sliver, almost all people would probably find influenza a more dangerous threat. And yet, we are told that nearly everyone’s entire way of life must be upended to protect this very small number of people, or protect ourselves from a threat that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The hidden truth is, we can easily protect the vulnerable without making everyone else’s life a living hell.
If we do get it, we have proven therapeutics with vaccines on the way. We won’t die, unless we have the health issues that would imperil some of us every flu season. We had good reason to know this fact at the start but powerful officials got caught up in a hysteria that was incited by grossly inflated death rates. Remember those? But Garcetti, Cuomo in New York, and Whitmer in Michigan still act as if the embarrassingly faulty fatality numbers in March came from the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. They behave as if a spike in “positive” cases equates with a spike in deaths. Few things are further from the truth.
Jay Bhattacharya
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in his presentation in Hillsdale College’s October issue of “Imprimis” clears the medical fog of war. Most importantly, he addresses the confusion that paralyzes Whitmer’s and Newsom’s mind on that notorious death rate. The number that corrupts their brains muddles “cases” with “infections”. The former is a much smaller number than the latter, with the former producing a much higher death rate if used as the formula’s denominator. “Infections” is a bigger number because it refers to people with the virus or having had it. “Cases” are just the number of people with the virus that show up at a medical facility. Seroprevalence tests – an analysis of the presence of virus markers in the form of antibodies and proteins – in Santa Clara County, Ca., and replicated in 82 studies around the world, showed 50 times more infections over cases. Thus, the death rate properly calculated must drop behind the decimal point and not in front of it. Bottom line: the virus’s lethality was and is greatly overstated.
Targeted mask-wearing, quarantining and assisting the vulnerable, and an opening of life for 95% of our people should be the order of the day. Above all, get the kids back in school. Increases in positive cases should no longer paralyze us into ruination. If you get it, see your doctor, stay home, and drink plenty of fluids. Sound familiar?
The two issues are linked on account of the virus-panic being used to mutilate our elections, in addition to butchering our entire way of life. Hewitt wallows in misconceptions about the 2020 election and the virus. The school closings and lockdowns are destroying the path to meaningful lives. Our third world-style election system gave us a person of mental incontinence who will be left to populate the executive branch, and the courts, with delusionary leftists. We are going to be in for a rough ride, and the disfigurement of rational treatment of the two events is no good service.
I have much to be thankful. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, two fabulous sons, dear friends and relations, a superb career in teaching, and a beautiful Montana retirement. Mine is a blessed life. Personally, it’s sunny. Extending the purview nationally, though, dark clouds are looming. Much of the dread emanates from Hollywood.
Speaking of the weather, in the language of climate change – the fad-issue of the day – the word of choice is “anthropogenic”, or “man-caused”. Our current political and cultural storm is anthropogenic by definition. Reality is being distorted through the funhouse mirror of Hollywood and the near uniform bias that permeates the great bulk of our media. It’s sad that informed contemplation has been replaced by this stuff.
I’m reminded of our constant flirtation with Hollywood’s diseased mind in the productions that roll off the entertainment industry’s assembly line. Take for example Netflix’s “The Crown”. The third season is upon us and my wife and I have seen them all in binge-watching forays. It’s a soap opera, and it isn’t history; however, there’s not much standing in the way for it, and most of Hollywood’s other affluence, from becoming the History. After all the schooling from K through PhD to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, a 19th century pioneer in an isolated homestead on the Great Plains is better equipped to handle the cultural noise than today’s typical upper classman in a university’s ASB. For them, and probably the bulk of streaming subscribers, the noise is mistaken for the music because there’s not much in the head to contradict it.
After viewing the last episode of season 3, I have a chance to ruminate on what I’ve seen. My conclusion? It’s entertainment, not history – and extremely opinionated entertainment at that. The butchering of important personages in the life of Queen Elizabeth Il, especially those on the right, is all too obvious. Churchill is reduced to a whimpering and emotional wreck. The reality of his forthrightness is hard to perceive in his frequent, blubbering downpour of tears. In an attempt to build up Elizabeth in relation to the old white guy, the script writers concocted the fantasy of a young Queen Elizabeth lecturing the elderly Churchill on some point of the British constitution in season 1. It’s absolutely unbelievable, but maybe believable to a poorly informed audience.
The blubbering Churchill as portrayed by John Lithgow.
Prince Philip comes in for analogous treatment. In the course of 3 seasons, I can’t recall an instance of his influence and advice being treated in a positive and sagacious light. How could somebody spend an entire life and be wrong throughout? I have my doubts. Counterpoint is a useful plot device, but this one presents a towering female Socrates to a bumbling prince consort. Could this be another opportunity for Hollywood to present the “other” upstaging the patriarchy? Maybe not, but it’s a familiar theme in everything from ads to movies. The zeal to correct for a generalized “wrong” leads to a fiction that will be mistaken for non-fiction in a population unable to draw the distinction.
Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown.
Take the character of Margaret Thatcher in this last season. Her character is molded into an emotionally scarred, rigid scold with strangely misogynistic tendencies. Imagine it, the worst of Britain’s aristocratic and sexist good ol’ boys in their men-only clubs have nothing on Britain’s first woman prime minister according to the people who put this thing together. The incongruency is profound.
Interestingly as a matter of fact, it’s well-known that she loved her mother.
The hard face of Gillian Anderson’s caricature of Margaret Thatcher in a seated position with her cabinet.
To make this portrayal a functioning theme, the setting of the 1970’s is stripped from the story. Other than a brief reference to strikes that lead to energy shortages during the tenure of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson – who’s portrayed positively by the way – we’re not given much to understand the reasons for the rise of Thatcher.
Let’s plow the fields of real history. In the 1970’s, the UN’s OECD had projected that the UK was on a glide path to the economic status of Albania. The unions had crippled the country with rampant strikes. Garbage wasn’t picked up due to strikes as shortages and inflation plagued consumers. Government-owned industries were mismanaged black holes at huge public expense. Anthony Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, an avowed Marxist, held the country hostage with his demands and strikes that periodically cut-off of the coal supply. The UK was a mess and ready for Thatcher. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t room for that context in a multi-season serial instead of the excursions into Princess Diana’s anorexia-bulimia.
Piles of rubbish lay uncollected on the streets in the winter of 1978/1979 amid strikes Litter mounted on the streets during the Winter of Discontent as collectors went on strike Gravediggers joined the strike action too, meaning that vans were filled with bodies to be embalmed and stored in disused factories.The miner’s strike crippled the country’s main source of heat and electricity.People queuing outside of bakery during flour shortage (‘the bread strike’) 1977, A sign reading ‘Sorry No Petrol’ outside a UK service station during a petrol shortage on February 1978. (Photograph: Pete Primarello/Getty Images)The unemployment rate began to spike before Thatcher became prime minister and remained high till the country is weaned off of the central planning of Labour’s socialism.
The Falklands War gets all of . . . 10 minutes . . . at most. And then it’s only mentioned as a backdrop to Thatcher’s narcissistic grandstanding. The reawakening of pride of country, and the magnitude of the success, was reduced to the scene of a self-absorbed Thatcher in a victory parade’s grandstand. The fact is lost on the producers that the success in the Falklands War gave Thatcher the breathing space to make headway in de-socializing the country. A much freer economy, a legacy of Thatcher’s reforms, would make possible the more prosperous UK of today.
And then there’s all the intimate dialogue. Where’d that stuff come from? Sure, the script writers have to put together a story by stringing the characters in verbal interaction. But most of it was most certainly contrived. There was no-one in the rooms of private quarters taking dictation on the conversations. It’s a tool in the scriptwriter’s kit to craft the character for certain plot purposes. It’s also how ideological zealotry can infect a story, and replace reality with a politically useful unreality.
Be prepared for next season. It’s likely to be Diana, more Diana, and Diana all the time.
Am I going to hang out in front of the tv when season 4 arrives? I don’t know. I’m inclined not to. I have no appetite for the elevation of ex-Princess Diana to sainthood.
Some logos lose their currency after a history of clownishness and/or misbehavior. Some examples might be “lawyer”, “college-educated”, “journalist”, “systemic racism”, and “fact checker”.
USAToday’s indomitable fact checker, Chelsey Cox, on her editor’s insistence, looked into a story on the website Babylon Bee, a satirizing website in the mold of SNL down to its marrow, on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to vacate the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Really, I kid you not (on the media’s gullibility, that is).
Here’s a part of Babylon Bee’s story. It’s a hoot.
[Headline] “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” “SAN FRANCISCO, CA—In a landmark ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. . . .’ Death, at its core, is a construct designed to subvert the rule of law by taking pro-choice liberal judges away from us too soon . . . We hereby rule any attempt by President Trump to appoint a replacement to be unconstitutional. We will block any attempt until we figure out a way to resurrect her or maybe clone her and restore her to her already ‘legally alive’ state. We’re still figuring that part out.”
Nicole Carroll, USAToday editor-in-chief
Our fearless fact checker, after a week of inquiry, concluded that it was “satire”. Without a hint of self-awareness, Cox writes,
“We rate this claim SATIRE, based on our research. A satirical article about the 9th Circuit “overturning” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has no basis in fact. It is true that the 9th Circuit has ruled against many Trump-era policies.”
