This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little. It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.
Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return. The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary. The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.
Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency. By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing. Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.
The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling. The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists. Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings. The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them. Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.
Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei. Others of the extended family soon followed. Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow. It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.
The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913. 13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy. One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist. All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.
Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters. From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin). The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford. In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.
January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles. This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast. Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society. For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world. There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable. Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.
Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them. Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician. He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power. Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.
Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA. A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence. Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people. Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”. They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.
Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties. For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world. This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.
Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.
If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.
Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.
Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue
The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.
Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief
Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.
Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.
That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.
Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.
For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.
Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.
A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.
Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after
The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.
It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.
Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.
The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.
As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility. We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable. Many of us do. It’s as if we want to be swindled. It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.
Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration. It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign. It succeeded. We elected a basement president. In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.
President Biden from the 6/27 debateMore of our president
They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time. The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president. According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”
The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans. On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),
“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”
Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew. They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality. Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game. Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.
It doesn’t end there. There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails. Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable. Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Not Trump, not anybody. If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards. The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics. Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks. Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon. This won’t end well. It never does. The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.
Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state. Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.
Look at what they gave us. You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it. The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds. The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread. They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family. It was an assault on our very nature. The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”. We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.
Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human? They tried really hard.
Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities. How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade? Somehow, energy density no longer mattered. Physics no longer matters. Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse. Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist. The already strained grid is to be burdened further. All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.
XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along. The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.
It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below). In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see. Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services. Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects. No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious. See the parallel?
Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all. People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA. A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us. Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist. Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns. Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world. Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger. You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue. We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.
From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves. Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room. In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery. If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement. It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.
Dr. Kendall Conger
Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy. Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.
Dr. Barbara Griffith, Duke University Health president
Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”. Dr. Conger asked, what science? In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish. The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”. Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how. When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
It’s more than that. The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”. You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables. Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen. What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)? Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room. What’s the difference?
Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity. A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut? All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science. Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.
Oh, the times that we live.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second
The Biden-Trump rematch is in the books. Who won and who lost? Nobody won, and Biden lost. Will they move on to a second match? Hardly.
In a nutshell, by the end of the talkathon, my fears about Biden’s infirmity were confirmed, but my concerns about Trump were elevated. Biden came off as a doddering old Marxist head honcho like one of those Eastern European party strongmen in the waning days of the Iron Curtain, or the party elders standing next to Brezhnev overlooking the May Day grand parade in Moscow in the 1970s. Yes, Biden is infirm but what came out of his mouth in his infirmity was the socialism that is firmly established Democratic Party doctrine. If the party movers and shakers succeeded in pushing him aside, his replacement won’t be an improvement, just more presentable.
The left-wing party establishment got what it wanted under Biden (and Obama), and the country is a wreck for it. Biden resorted to the party’s doctrinal tics throughout the debate: tax the “rich” to save Social Security (it won’t), all the “pay their fair share” talk, the greenie nonsense, the “glories” of ending unborn life as if it was God’s eleventh commandment, and more bribery of friendly political constituencies with other people’s money. It’s disgusting, and ruinous.
For his part, Trump was . . . Trump. He brought his “A” game, as in donkey. He donned his adolescent schoolyard bully uniform for all to see. Vague generalities, superlatives in regard to himself, avoidance of questions in favor of rudimentary insults, and the repetitive use of a monotonous standard line were the essence of his performance.
Trump boasts were routine. For instance, “I’ll end the Ukraine War before inauguration day.” How’s he going to do that? He has no practical leverage on Putin. He’ll hang Zelensky out to dry and give Putin a third of the country, that’s how. All will be done in an isolated meeting after which there will be a smiling Trump photo op. Zelensky won’t be smiling, Ukraine will be in tears, and naked aggression will have been rewarded. Speculation? It’s more realistic than any of Trump’s self-assessments.
Trump made the correct observation that other world leaders see Biden as an embarrassment. After last night’s performance, they see our country as crazy. Are these two people the best that we can come up with?
Now more than ever, we need a real leader to prosecute the case against the creeping socialism that is smothering us, and for the unborn. We don’t have one, certainly not in Trump. Trump has always been merely a walking gesture, the middle finger to our decrepit politico-cultural elites. He’s incapable of presenting an argument, a line of reasoning. It shows every time that he steps onto a stage. In the meantime, the country is careening to insolvency. At this juncture, neither party will even recognize the tidal wave of debt that threatens to swamp us and our ability to defend ourselves. Eco-central planning is no more coherent than the kind in the old Soviet Union. Who do we have to make the case? Who has the wherewithal to convince the American people to turn away from their belief in the impossible, from decadence?
Don’t look for it in Trump. Don’t look for it in either political party. We need leadership, not a middle finger.
Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it. It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world. “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world. Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state. This is a completely new and radical notion. Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance. People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”. A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.
At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment. You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity. However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order. And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.
Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care. In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:
“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)
Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid. A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.
It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below). He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations. The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify. For them, where’s that in the Bible?
It isn’t. It’s contra-biblical. But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion. Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes. Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state. Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.
The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become. Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting. On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk. The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies. It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia. After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain. Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?
Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England
Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children. On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below), Europe is pulling back from the brink. Not so in America. We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations. From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below). These people are making our nation grotesque.
Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution. They are the counter-revolution.
Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.
For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave. Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos. Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below). The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children. It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.
California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta
Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them? Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf
Progressivism is a totalitarian project. It’s not a rule of law project. It’s an effort to make everyone conform in heart, mind, soul, and behavior to a singular outlook that emanates from a singular social element (bicoastal, urban, white-collar, an academy smothered in radical progressivisms). Ends are all that matters; means are basically irrelevant to them.
It played out again before the Supreme Court. The Left, the home of today’s muscular progressivism, is all aflutter over the Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill (June 14, 2024) to find no legislative warrant to ban bump stocks (see #1 below). It didn’t rule on the propriety of a ban on bump stocks. That’s not the judiciary’s job in our constitutional order. The courts apply the laws in cases before it. It’s simple for the Article III branch: no law, no case. If you want bump stocks prohibited, elect a gung-ho Congress and President to make such a law. It’s a job for legislation. It’s the job of your elected representatives. If not enough of them are elected, don’t act like little caudillos to the rest of us by inventing law where no law exists, playing a pretend game while trampling underfoot the design of our civic order.
The Court’s ruling in Garland v. Cargill hinged on a basic question: Where’s the law to justify Trump’s 2018 order to ban bump stocks? The language of the Federal Firearms Act (1934) and the Gun Control Act (1968) are weak gruel for Trump and the progressive totalitarians among us to magically summon up a legal basis to reach beyond what Congress has authorized. Up until 2018, the ATF repeatedly announced its lack of authority to ban the things. The reason is obvious. The FFA defines an automatic weapon as something integral and internal to the trigger set of the gun, not to the novel and awkward ways a semiautomatic gun is held or shouldered. Sorry, progressives, no law, no case.
One of the progressives’ favorite gambits is to announce a supposedly irrefutable history judgment that is easily refuted. You know, the one that magically transmutes a well-understood individual right into a fashionable government right for a militia. It flies in the face of history. No one up until the rise of 20th century progressivism, and still too few since, viewed grandpa’s shotgun as a part of the National Guard’s armory. 17th century Englishmen were armed to the teeth, and it was codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1688-9. We were founded as transplanted Englishmen in the sense that their culture and norms took root here and were reflected in colonial-state charters/constitutions.
Progressives, admit it, you want to change the Constitution without following the rules, which demands an amendment, or at least a law from the Article I branch and concurrence of the Article II. If the rules are too cumbersome for you, that’s sign that you don’t have enough support. So, don’t try to cram down the people’s throat that for which you don’t have enough support. You’re showing yourselves to be singularly authoritarian, if not totalitarian.
It appears that the ruling denizens of our cities, faculty lounges, and coastal enclaves won’t be happy till everyone eats, dresses, thinks dutifully agnostic, and in all other ways adopts the habits of a Manhattan or Malibu soirée. Sounds pretty totalitarian to me.
But, like the Court majority in Garland v. Cargill, where’s the law? Hopefully, with the exception of someone named Trump being pursued by Alvin Bragg before a Manhattan judge and jury, there’s still enough respect for the rule of law, and the rules, to protect us from the caprice of a small social clique. They still need law, which I pray that we won’t grant them.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Official Supreme Court ruling in Garland v. Cargill at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-976_e29g.pdf
2. Thanks to Charles C. W. Cooke for his piece in National Review, “CNN’s Dominic Erdozain Is Lying about Firearms Law Again”, 6/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnns-dominic-erdozain-is-lying-about-firearms-law-again/
3. “Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks on guns”, John Fritze et al, CNN, 6/14/2024, at https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/politics/supreme-court-bump-stocks/index.html
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined from left by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., speaks to reporters before a vote on legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022. (AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite)
How can a deep red state continue to send a progressive to represent it in the US Senate? How can a state’s electorate continue to elect people who do things that they don’t like? The key word is “continue”. Yet, simultaneously, people consistently register dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in polls. Wrong-track numbers persistently hover in the 60s. We need to explore the possibility that we are being fooled, or, more accurately, allowing ourselves to be fooled. The foolishness is a partnership between political jesters and an impressionable electorate prone to folly. People don’t like the results but go to the polls and contribute to them. Does this make any sense?
Two anecdotes point to the nature of the problem. One is Democrat John Tester’s popularity in red-state Montana. The other is the decimation of California under a raft of policies that originate in a popularly elected super-majority of Democrats ruling the roost on the state’s populous coastal plain and thus in the state capitol. If migration patterns within and out of the state are any indication of the level of dissatisfaction, the state is in a world of hurt that ironically is popularly chosen.
Tester’s prominence in my adopted home state of Montana is particularly vexing. One possible contributing factor is money, the mother’s milk of politics (see #1-#5 below). Tester is a creation of out-of-state money, and a whole lot of it. He’s a boxer with a potent left-right combination. He jabs with his left in the form of money flowing into his personal campaign to project his oneness with tradition, the rural lifestyle, domesticity, veterans, the outdoors, guns, and Montana’s working man. He elicits an image of rubbing elbows with Republicans and Trump, who’s popular in the state.
John Tester in campaign ad
Anyone with half a brain would recognize this to be baloney. As he washes grease and dirt from his hands in a tv ad, the reality is that he’ll go back to Washington to reelect Chuck Schumer of New York for leader of the Senate. This is the same Chuck Schumer who’d pack the Supreme Court with lefties, who’d eliminate the filibuster to make it easier for his congressional allies to mangle voting throughout America by removing the few remaining barriers against fraud such as voter ID, who’d ad DC and Puerto Rico as states to create a lock of four more Democrat senators to guarantee such absurdities into the foreseeable future, turning the whole country into New York and California. Tester is a vote for continued bi-coastal control of the federal Leviathan, with all of their baleful influences.
Tester has the bank for his left jab to burnish his outdoors cred while he has a devastating right in Chuck Schumer’s Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to appeal to the darker angels of a public’s nature. This is a massive negative campaign to paint his opponent, Tim Sheehy, as an out-of-stater bent on raping Montana. Get this? A real out-of-stater from the power elite of New York is smashing Sheehy for allegedly being like him.
Putting aside the fact that Sheehy has beliefs and sentiments more in line with the popular Trump, we need to pull the covers away from Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to expose its rank duplicity. What we see is the darker underbelly of politics. The pro-Tester (no pun intended) group leaves a paper and money trail from DNC-patronized banks right to Schumer’s Senate office and right to the anti-Sheehy ad buys flooding Montana’s airwaves – over $5.6 million worth, and counting, as of June 12 of this year according to Open Secrets (see #4 below).
Here’s how the flim-flam works. Money is laundered from Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, into Majority Forward PAC – a 501(c)(4) group that doesn’t have to disclose its contributors – and from there into LBP. These expenditures go through Dem-linked banks and consultancies in DC and Alexandria, Va. Throughout, Tester has plausible deniability. He can walk the high road of remaining positive about himself while the dirty work of maligning his opponent is performed by mysterious dark forces (see #5 below). It’s morally scandalous, but it works, as it did in the 2022 midterms.
It only works if the residents of Montana allow it. The story of this sleight-of-hand has been out for quite some time, since at least mid-2023. As before a judge, ignorance of it is no excuse. If you don’t know, you should have.
Its success is dependent on inventing fear, fear of something that doesn’t exist: stoking fear of Sheehy to assist the Democrats in continuing to move the country down the “wrong track”, and in the case of California, dread of an ecological disaster. The stage is set for a headlong rush to the emasculation of California’s entire way of life, the most striking “wrong track” that one can imagine.
Chevron gas station in Encinitas, Calif., October 23, 2023 (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
The state’s entire governmental apparatus is geared to overturning the simple bases of life through a full-on assault on energy. Why? Climate-change hysteria. The fear factor gets people elected to enact edicts that disrupt how its residents pursue life in the most basic ways, and for the worst.
First, the hysteria. California’s popular ruling clique is terrorized, and is terrorizing, by a global average increase of 1.34 degree Celsius since 1880, well within the fluctuations in geologic time. And, besides, warming temps are a much healthier experience for growing food and increasing plant life, and better than the opposite with its plagues and famines and deadly freezes (see #6-7 below). If CO2 is the culprit, plants love it; and that’s the main reason for questioning it as a pollutant, that and our emission of CO2 every time we exhale. Are normal body functions now to be the target of regulatory extinction alongside the internal combustion engine?
The fabricated fright is even more outlandish when they try to strike a chord with the economy-minded by magically spawning imaginary threats to our standard of living. The chutzpah. At worst, according to Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy, the warming will have a modest impact. He decries the hysteria as “shock-journalistic pseudoscience” (see #6 below). Given all the benefits of warming temps, the recent elevated levels of CO2 may be a net plus. The only real threat emanates from California’s ruling claque.
If the fanciful prospect of frying us in the skillet of a 1.34 degrees Celsius increase in 144 years won’t do the trick, maybe the story of twisters and hurricanes run amok will. In today’s politicized jargon, it’s called “extreme weather”. It may work if the fabulists pursue the Big Lie route. The fact is, just looking at hurricanes, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study concludes that there appear to be no “… compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in … [catastrophic] hurricane[s] ….” (see #8 below)
Fires might manufacture the necessary panic if hurricanes won’t. But, here again, the world’s total fire-ravaged area hit a new low (see #6 below). Could California’s recent spate of firestorms be a consequence of its uniquely screwball wildlands management policies and its forcible diversion of utility funds away from grid maintenance to “sustainable” pipe dreams? California’s governing choices are proving to be the match in the powder magazine.
What about droughts? Where’s the proof that SUVs and Exxon are triggering droughts? Others report that CO2 reduces drought – warm air carries more moisture (look at the tropics) – and increases food production (see #6 below). Anyway, droughts aren’t an unusual circumstance in a Mediterranean climate. Dry-summer could easily flip into dry-all-year if the normal annual pattern of offshore ocean temps flip, which they normally do in roughly 10-year oscillations. The window is awfully narrow – 5-6 months – for the state to get its annual allotment of precipitation. If it falls short at any time during that brief period, it’s in drought for the rest of the year.
But such attempts at realism are a yawner for the power-hungry utopians who are elected to run the state. Not possessing a shortage of other rhetorical arrows in their quiver, though, they’ll bark out the dubious crisis of rising sea levels. From 1880 to 2023, annual sea elevations have variously increased by an averaged .08 to .14 inches per year, with .06 being the number for 133 of those years (see #6 below). At that rate, it’ll be a couple of geological eras before the state’s foothills become beachfront property. Continental drift is faster.
No wonder California is the epitome of “wrong track”. The climate caterwauling has led to the election of people who pass laws and enforce them to further nudge the state’s residents down the path to dystopia, and it’s about to get worse for the remaining residents of the state. The state with one of the highest fuel prices in the nation (second only to Hawaii) is dead set on ballooning them to the thermopause (top of the atmosphere). No remorse, the state’s governing super-majority is cheerleading the pain by using it to make you conform to their chosen lifestyle for you. By hook or by crook, for instance, they want to make you trade reliability for range anxiety.
Don’t forget, nothing that they’re doing to their own residents will make a difference for the climate. California’s 38 million (and falling) are pale when compared to China and India’s 2-3 billion. Newsom and company will do more in reducing emissions if they convince Xi and Modi to stop their nations’ march to prosperity. In other words, persuade them to do to their countries what the California Dems are busy doing to the golden state. Good luck, Gavin.
The state’s popularly elected super-majority in Sacramento have created a legal glide path to terminal decline. What’s bad is about to get worse. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), one of the state’s principal eco-commissariats, is using the Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) and cap-and-trade laws to hijack the state’s residents out of their fuel-efficient sedans and big rigs and into dangerously frivolous electric vehicles.
One leg of the double-whammy uses fuel taxes under LCFS. Diesel taxes provide a glimpse into the fate for regular gas, and all fossil fuels. CARB’s timetable for ruination ratchets diesel taxes upwards from 59 cents (2025) to 66 (2026) to $2.41 (2041) (see #9 below). By that time (2041), your perfectly good family sedan and those diesel semi’s trucking down the road will be littering junk yards. I cringe at the thought of chronically empty store shelves and Amazon warehouses in the state and price hikes on everything.
The other leg utilizes the state’s cap-and-trade folderol. CARB has scheduled a lowering of the emissions cap each year (see #9 below). Above that, companies are taxed. It’s all geared to get you as a person or company to trade the reliable (fossil fuels) for the intermittent and unreliable (the “sustainable” stuff). If you think that you’ll do just fine in this brave new world, you’re in need of a drug test. Your prospects only improve if the ruling donkey progressives are stopped electorally. I’m pessimistic on that score.
Expect “wrong track” to be only thing that rises – that and prices. Did “they” do this to us, or did we choose it? I’m inclined to believe, based on all the evidence, that foolishness is popular. We don’t like the results but still go ahead and choose the cause of our discontents. Montanans might very well choose Chuck Schumer (through Tester) and Californians may prefer degradation for their kids and generations to come. We get the government that we deserve.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Non-profit files FEC complaint against Super PAC’s spending on anti-Sheehy ads”, Nicole Girten, Daily Montanan, 2/24/2024, at https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/14/non-profit-files-fec-complaint-against-super-pacs-spending-on-anti-sheehy-ads/
2. “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, 9/12/2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276
3. “Chuck Schumer Is Behind This Mysterious PAC Meddling in Montana’s GOP Primary”, Joseph Simonson, Washington Free Beacon, 1/26/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/chuck-schumer-is-behind-this-mysterious-pac-meddling-in-montanas-gop-primary/
4. “Last Best Place PAC Outside Spending”, Open Secrets, according to data reported on 6/12/2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail?cmte=C00849729&cycle=2024
5. “Schumer-tied dark money group wires $6 million to GOP primary meddler as Democrats slam anonymous cash”, Gabe Kaminsky, Washington Examiner, 4/24/2024, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/2975704/schumer-dark-money-gop-primary-meddler/
6. “The Green Left Lies Used to Justify Authoritarian Climate Regulation”, John Fund and David Simon, National Reivew, 6/9/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-green-left-lies-used-to-justify-authoritarian-climate-regulation/
7. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, 5/20/2015, at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
8. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Global Warming and Hurricanes”, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), 4/17/2024, at https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
9. “California Gas Prices to Go from Bad to Worse as Dems Move to Tighten Environmental Regulations”, David Zimmerman, National Reivew, 6/12/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-gas-prices-to-go-from-bad-to-worse-as-dems-move-to-tighten-environmental-regulations/
We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents. California is the template for what ails us. It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream. Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play. Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.
This progressivism is monstrous. It’s an agent of desolation. Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven. Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity. It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).
All of us are living it. The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess. As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution. Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike. The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye. If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside. If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.
Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandalSteve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)
Compare the two. Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony. He’s contradicted by the facts. Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year. Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity. Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress. What happened to Holder’s contempt charge? Nothing. It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).
Not true for Bannon. For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead. Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity. I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity. Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty. So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time. But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.
We aren’t that kind of nation any longer. Thanks, progressives.
Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people. The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it. Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump. Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.
It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.
A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.
Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA. Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing. No apologies, just convictions.
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955
The sad saga doesn’t end there. Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc. It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin. They didn’t sign up for this. Who would?
A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration. The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw. It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities. A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).
Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly
Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California. Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative. How? Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures. The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart. State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative. The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”. The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”. It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”. The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court. The thing is dead, dead.
Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California
On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life. This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense. It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.
Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster. For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful. Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief? If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback. Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DAJudge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail
In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else. As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob. No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.
It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time. It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges. One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo. In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads. Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end. The gambit is all Third World.
Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime. Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy. Think it through. For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money. There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it. Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.
In the Trump saga, where’s the crime? Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal. The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired. When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).
Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would. Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit. The cabal needs a second crime though. How to manufacture one? Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below). Let that sink in. Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime. It can’t be. It’s the stuff of campaigns. Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.
Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality. The whole thing is rubbish. Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling. Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.
And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted. The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team. Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical. Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot? This stinks to high heaven.
It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens. Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world. What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”? Some say democracy is messy. No, that’s too nice. This makes us third-rate, all of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/
