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Nutters on the Right

The Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene Traveling Freak Show is the Future of the GOP
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)
JD Vance Screens for Wokeness Among State Department Nominees: Report
Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio)

I’m beginning to wonder if Reagan was right … in reverse.  In 1962, he said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, is the Republican Party leaving me?

No, I have no intention at this juncture of jettisoning the GOP.  The other options are too horrible to contemplate.  Me, a Democrat, the party of eco-madness and neo-Marxism?  A Libertarian, or freedom gone amok?  Green? You’ve got to be kidding.  Independent?  Kinda, but there still remains many sane voices in the GOP to reject abandoning ship.

One of those voices in the wilderness is Mitch McConnell.  But sadly, he’s retiring.  Yes, that Mitch McConnell, the one with the guts to tell the neo-isolationist and protectionist right to stuff it.  The Majorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz/J.D. Vance clown caucus in the party does not represent those who fondly remember Reagan and his legacy, as does Mitch McConnell.  Strangely, the circus part of the party has come full circle in support of a thuggish enemy – Putin – and those who treat NATO like it is a mirage – Viktor Orban of Hungary.  While history rhymes, it’s more than rhyming here.  It’s a replay of 1930s Europe, complete with a revival of America First.  McConnell knows it, and spoke up in the well of the Senate last Thursday (5/16) against some of the lunacy (see #1 below).

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Sen. Mitch McConnell (l) and Viktor Orban

And I quote from McConnell as he strips away the illusions about Putin as anything other than an architect of a new Axis:

“This week, Putin is in Beijing, tending to what Russia and China have called a ‘friendship without limits.’  But last week, it was President Xi who took to the road. And notably, his warmest welcome was in Budapest, Hungary.”

Yes, he brought up Hungary.  It seems to be a habit with Hungary to cozy up to thugs.  The country allied with Germany in WWII.  Orban is true to form.  Quoting McConnell:

“Viktor Orbán’s government has cultivated the PRC as its top trading partner outside the EU.  It has given Beijing sweeping law-enforcement authority to hunt dissidents on Hungarian soil.  It was the first European country to join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which other European governments — like Prime Minister Meloni’s in Italy — have wisely decided to leave.”

From blocking the entry of Finland and Sweden in NATO and allowing the CCP to nestle its tentacles in his country to the detriment of others (the CCP’s 5G Huawei, etc.), Orban is bent on rhyming with the 1930s.  Cavorting with clearly hostile hegemons is not what friends do, and aren’t deserving of angelic portrayals by patsies in American media and the simple-minded in office.

Why this sudden and mysterious affection for goons (Putin) and the disruptors (Orban) of a NATO alliance that has successfully shielded us from World War III in Europe?  As for Hungary, frankly, most Americans couldn’t find the country on a map, or identify Orban, or care.  Yet, lately, there has emerged a political/media industrial complex in the party built upon “no more foreign wars” and tariffs.  You can bet that where this clown car’s radar-love is directed, the complex’s Tucker Carlson will show up to sing their hosannas.  Oh, he already has, in Moscow and Budapest.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin
Carlson interviewed Putin, Feb. 2024

American fatigue from the Wars on Terror is understandable, but this astounding abandonment of international and moral responsibilities under the banner of the GOP?  Now, that’s an amazing turn.

You can see the rigmarole starting when Trump came down the escalator in 2015.  Trump, looking for political leverage against Jeb Bush in the party primary, bashed not only Jeb, but his brother, George.  The “forever wars” chant entered the party bloodstream to be picked up by kooks.  His breathtaking win in 2016 sent shockwaves and a green light to the easily deranged.  It was more than policies.  It was an implicit sanction for brusque presentation, personality, and policies.  Aping Trump is now a fad.  Watch Kerry Lake, Arizona GOP Senate candidate.

Making the NATO countries “pay their fair share” didn’t stop there for the batty.  For many of them, NATO made Putin an enemy.  Sound familiar?  Not too long ago, we were accused of making Ho Chi Minh an enemy.  America First of 1940 said the same thing of Hitler.  Remember?  Expansion of NATO to cover countries in the maw of a Putin anxious to reconstitute “Russia’s near abroad” (Echoes of lebensraum?) is blamed for his tanks crossing borders and seeking solace in the arms of the grotesquely ambitious like Xi and the mullahs of Iran.  And the Anglo-French alliance of the 1930s unleashed the Wehrmacht.  Right?  Sounds like pretzel logic.  Sounds like appeasement, the 1938 Munich Agreement (look it up).

Add in the Russia hoax of 2016-17 and the Democrats’ Trump impeachment soap operas, which incorporated Ukraine into the sordid tale, and we have the preternaturally disposed thug-lovers in the party leaping into Putin’s arms and assisting his conquest of Ukraine through abandonment and betrayal.  On the heels of Biden’s bugout from Afghanistan, who would want to be dependent on us?  Israel, are you listening?

The inauspicious nexus of war fatigue and Trump couldn’t come at a worse time.  Are Americans really prepared for the blowback?  Right now, the well-balanced in the party are rudderless.  Too many in the party are enchanted by almost anything that oozes out of Trump’s mouth.

One thing that dribbled out is his promise to end the Ukraine War in 24 hours (see #3 below).  How?  A Ukraine surrender. Think this thing through.  The showman of the “art of the deal” would threaten both Zelensky and Putin, as if there’s a moral equivalence.  To threaten Zelensky, he must be willing to cut off aid.  For the Kremlin thug, he promises to arm Ukraine to the teeth, something that we should be doing anyway.  He can’t do both at the same time.

The first is realistic since many in the Trump wing of the party are already chomping at the bit to have a Russian expeditionary force in Kyiv.  As for the second, aid to Ukraine up to now hasn’t caused Putin to flinch one iota, especially if “boots on the ground” is off the table.  He’s developed new alliances and markets for his fossil fuels.  He’s resorted to human wave assaults, marking as conscripts nearly anyone on two legs, including the imprisoned, not shirking from blitz tactics targeting huge civilian targets.  Cracks appear in NATO (Orban’s Hungary) and in America.  He’s got every reason to stick it out.  After all, Trump’s rise on the political scene – “no more forever wars” – and Biden’s bugout philosophy are testament to America’s longevity and dependability.  In the end, “24 hours” is a Ukraine surrender.

This is what today’s America delivers: a nutty right enthralled by gorillas and, of course, a left in ecstasy of kumbaya.  It’s the goofy right that bothers me the most.  I expect it of the left. Reagan conservatism was the counterbalance of sanity.  With the Reagan wing waxing, the right can no longer be trusted to keep the world from teetering into the arms of this new Axis.  In fact, the batty on the right thinks that we can live without the world. Remember America First?

The nutter right can’t grasp the fact that for America to be first, allies must be a close second – allies both commercially and strategically.  Allies reduce the burden on America’s sons and daughters.  It’s a simple equation.

Republicans need to park the clown car.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. You can read Mitch McConnell’s whole speech at “McConnell Remarks On Resisting Chinese Influence in NATO”, 5/16/2024, at https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcconnell-remarks-on-resisting-chinese-influence-in-nato
2. Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for bringing to my attention McConnell’s speech at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mcconnell-vs-orban/
3. “Trump describes how he could solve Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours”, Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 7/16/2023, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-describes-how-he-could-solve-russia-ukraine-conflict-24-hours

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

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Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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Antisemitism Is in the Money

Soros ATM

The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace.  They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre.  Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities.  Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head.  There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”.  And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.

Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).  Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below).  The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000.  No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.

No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached.  It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “.  Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part II

Science is Red in Tooth and Claw: Biologists vs Physicists vs Biologists | by Paul Austin Murphy ...

Previously, I painted a picture of the mindset that gave us our urban hellscapes.  Referring to this social element as the “REI crowd”, they live in an artificial world that breeds an outlook favorable for the creation of dystopia.  Below is a touch of reality for those whose view of nature is a park.  They’d never bring a gun on the hike, and REI won’t sell you one.

This guy got off easy. Others didn’t.  Those that survived don’t look the same.

Come on, let’s get real.  Guns are handy things to have in a nature that is truly like nature.  And now, additionally, they’re really handy in those urban enclaves under threat of a new kind of apex predator, the kind nurtured under the banner of “social justice”.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part I

Black Lives Matter - BLM Yard Sign | Passion Works Studio

I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching.  Noticed what?  It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life.  These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park.  Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world.  The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.

It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel.  Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place.  Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.

Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity.  The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves.  It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses.  It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee.  It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”.  It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation.  It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.

I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods.  They don’t sell guns.  They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature.  Forget about bear spray.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . .  Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.

E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia.  Watch it below.  Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality.  The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.

RogerG

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The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero

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Thomas Sowell

The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.”  California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.

Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome.  The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams.  Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay.  Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.

All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”  You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll.  So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!

Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below).  9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year.  Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel.  El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots.  Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%.  Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?

Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon.  Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes).  So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model.  Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.”  If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop.  How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?

An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below).  The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state.  West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state.  Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers.  The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city.  Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.

Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed.  Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year.  The 30-40% are back to $0.

Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic.  Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim.  When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/

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The Radicalization Began Much Earlier

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed.  They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class.  Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.

Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what.  Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.

Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.

Red Mass speaker Robert P. George announced - Today's Catholic
Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton University

RogerG

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Charles Malik, A Christian Clairvoyant

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Charles Malik (l) and today’s “student” protesters

Who was Charles Malik (1906-1987)?  A devout Christian, he’s a man of public service with a distinguished academic pedigree at a time when the academy wasn’t so overwhelmingly sullied in doctrinaire neo-Marxism.  Of Lebanese nationality, an escapee from Nazi Germany and move to the US to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, he taught at the school and other American universities.  He returned to his native Lebanon to serve as the country’s ambassador to the US after WWII and helped author the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  And he proved to be a prophet of things to come at our colleges.

In 1980, he delivered an address at Wheaton College warning of the moral chaos of the current reign of philosophical materialism and nihilism (rejection of objective standards, the basic guideposts for human flourishing) that he saw conquering the campuses 40 years ago (see #1 and #2 below).  He put part of the blame at the feet of intellectual Christians, and Christian leaders in general, who abandoned the academy to the philosophical barbarians.  Much of evangelical Christianity embraced political activism – the Moral Majority, et al – but at the same time scurried off into their own social silos, leaving the intellectual training grounds for future generations to be swamped by militant secular collectivists of all stripes.  As he put it, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

The Humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, theology, art, etc.) were mangled beyond recognition.  While declining in funding and enrollment, even in their tortured form, they still proved to be influential in shaping the minds of the next couple of generations down to the present day.  There is no alternative to the rule of materialism’s atheism from K to grad school.  It’s what happens when you abandon the field.

In response, a kind of anti-intellectualism took root in many Christian circles.  Honestly, who can blame them after what they’re seeing in posts and broadcasts today from campuses around the country?  Charles Malik warned us, though.  It’s a consequence of a sin of omission of the Christian community: a surrender of the field to the brutes.

By the faithful’s flight from the campuses, we allowed a takeover that would breed future generations of pillagers of our civilization.  It isn’t pretty as the next crop of young people will be robbed of the benefit of a more robust learning experience that more fully enriches our sense of ourselves.  Instead, we have encampments that extoll savagery.

Indeed, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

RogerG

Sources:
1. “The Two Tasks”, an address delivered by Dr. Charles Malik at Wheaton College, 1980, The Charles Malik Institute, at https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf
2. Thanks to Joseph Loconte, scholar in residence at New College of Florida, for bringing the subject to my attention in “A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy”, National Review, 5/4/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/a-christian-prophets-unheeded-warning-to-the-academy/

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An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

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A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)

Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality.  A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”.  His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).

A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.

“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America].  No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump.  But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction.  A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness.  No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”

The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses.  High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below).  Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools.  Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole.  How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed?  The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks.  When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.

And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s.  Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.

It’s everywhere.  It’s on YouTube.  For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes.  It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more.  No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad).  It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good.  16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”.  You know the banter.

This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away.  Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself.  For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings.  Quoting him:

“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes.  I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth.  They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly.  They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”

Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth.  You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind.  The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first