Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.
A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.
Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.
Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.
Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.
Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.
Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.
Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.
Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.
RogerG
* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.