Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.
A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.
A WA teacher's union president says reopening schools is an example of "white supremacy," concern over a child's mental health or suicide risk is "white privilege," and push to reopen schools is like rioters pushing to enter the U.S. Capitol.
The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).
ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.
That’s the “good” news.
The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:
I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.
Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.
And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.
I’ll come back to that.
There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).
Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.
Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.
And it’s been downhill from there.
The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.
Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…
…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.
So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.
How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?
Oh, so NOW they’re starting to talk about it? I’ve been pointing out this looming problem for years. Look, people can afford about $1,500 per month for housing. If interest rates are 7%, then most of the payment goes to interest so principal must be lower – home prices fall. But if home prices fall, Baby Boomer home owners lose equity. The Fed has kept interest rates low to preserve the equity in Baby Boomers’ homes; but that also meant low interest rates on savings. Boomers have money tied up in their houses because there’s nowhere else to invest. Most Boomers are sheep, they follow the herd. When they decide to sell their existing homes and move to retirement homes, the competition for buyers will lead to reduced home prices. The race to the bottom, coupled with low interest rates on savings, will wipe out the wealth of an entire generation. Since they have no savings, and no equity, Boomers will be dependent Social Security and Medicare. But those programs already are incapable of self-support and young people carrying college debt and new homes can’t afford to pay higher taxes. The entire thing is an actuarial nightmare. Or more accurately, a house of cards awaiting the slightest puff of breeze to bring it down. When the US economy collapses in a mountain of unsustainable debt, the world economy goes with it. Our military preparedness is low, our economy is suspect, our enemies are gaining strength, our borders are undefended. It’s beginning to feel as if I’m sitting in Rome in 450 AD. What lies ahead is a thousand years of darkness. Luckily, Democrats are focused like a laser on what’s important – making sure Americans cannot defend themselves after the crash. Joe Doakes
Best case, that collapse leads to forced privatization of…well, most everything. It’s not implausible.
But given the sheep-like nature and entitlement of the “elites” of the Millennial generation, I’m not too bullish on best-case solutions.
…with trying to run a society with the entitled cranks that make up so much of the modern left is that if you’re a consevative, they really, really hate you and the idea of sharing a society with you.
“Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation
This epi of “Marketplace” – or, more specifically, its A-line feature on workplaces catering to (liberal) peoples’ politics – may have been one of the most depressing things I’ve heard lately.
It starts at 17:36.
The unstated coda to the piece: “progressive” America wants to “other” all dissent out of every aspect of life.
I just left a contract at a group that was less obnoxious about it than the preening virtue-signalers in the Marketplace piece – but not, I suspect, out of lack of wanting to be. And it got me thinking – for all the talk about “tribalism” – usually from the left, aimed at the likes of Trump supporters and Tea Partiers – it’s Big Left that really takes this stuff seriously.
Last week, amid news of several states’ abortion laws (intended to provoke SCOTUS-ready legal challenges to Roe V. Wade), one-time “actress” Alyssa Milano declared a “sex strike”.
And Milano – whose movie credits include “Who’s The Boss”, [NOTE TO MITCH: TRY TO CARE ABOUT ALYSSA MILANO’S “ACTING CAREER” LONG ENOUGH TO GET A LIST IN HERE BEFORE YOU PUBLISH THIS], and, uh, “Who’s The Boss”, reacted, well, about as well as you’d expect:
With states continuing to restrict abortions despite her #SexStrike protest, Alyssa Milano became so furious that she destroyed her own property, she admitted on Twitter Wednesday. “I just threw my phone across the room. Cracked the screen. Read this. Please,” Milano tweeted, linking to CBS News story about an 11-year-old girl who couldn’t get an abortion because of Ohio’s “heartbeat bill.”… “Heartbeat bills,” which prohibit most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, have passed in four states this year, and Alabama lawmakers on Tuesday voted to effectively outlaw the procedure entirely. Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, was expected to sign the legislation. Although none of the laws have gone into effect amid legal challenges, pro-choice advocates fear they will push the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1972 ruling enshrining the right to abortion.
She’s a former child star, and not used to getting her way. But then, progs are largely the same.
I don’t cry much – but I love, love, love this video of a progressive pro-infanticide snowflake trying to argue that she’s above the law, that there’s a different set of rules for progressives in campus…
To: Andrew Zimmern, Celebrity Chef From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant Re: Appreciation!
Chef,
I caught this on Twitter over the past weekend:
Although the government shutdown is ending, at @lucky_cricket_west_end we are planning to continue to serve all those with a Fed Gov ID throughout next week, Monday-Friday, 2-5pm. We realize that furloughed workers will continue to need food since they h… https://t.co/h6qga7mPUPpic.twitter.com/67fbA92RaC
Glad to see you’ll be giving “Free” food to people who missed two checks…
…well, no. Wait. They had two checks delayed before getting it all paid back, amid a national welter of corporate virtue signaling of financial support – extremely low-interest loans, offers to skip payments, and, well, free food.
I and a few million private sector workers would have loved some of that ‘compassion” when we were struggling.
Know what I heard from one bill collector when I was out of work back in 2003? “Get a job”.
I’ve become convinced that the greatest ever in rotation of Berg’s 7th law has been this past two decades’ drum beat of promises that there is “an avalanche of right wing terrorism” just around the corner.
Speaking to Variety at the event, he warned of the turn that he sees America taking and cautioned there will be “blood in the streets” if Republicans remain in control.
“This is nascent fascism. We always had a turnkey, totalitarian state — all we needed was an excuse, and all the institutions were in place to turn this into pure fascism,” Cromwell said. “If we don’t stop [President Trump] now, then we will have a revolution for real. Then there will be blood in the streets.”
The star, who previously played George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s “W,” echoed these sentiments during his acceptance speech, where he warned that he believes the country is headed toward the possibility of a violent revolution.
“We’re living in very curious times, and something is coming up which is desperately important to this country and to this planet, and that is an election, in which hopefully in some measure we are going to take back our democracy,” he said. “We will have a government that represents us and not the donor class. We will cut through the corruption, [and] we won’t have to do what comes next, which is either a non-violent revolution or a violent one, because this has got to end.”
I don’t think members of the “elite” Realize how many Americans are ready to take him up on that. I don’t think it’s going to go nearly as well as they – Cromwell – think it will.
It’s been a busy year – and among the things that’ve slipped has been my “Climate of Hate” page, in which I document the ongoing wave of leftist violence in America, especially as relates to the “#Resistance”.
So if you’ve got any links to campaign thuggery that I’ve missed, if . you’ve got a moment, please leave ’em in the comment section.
Senator Warren just held a press conference saying that genetics tests prove that she is of between 1/64 and 1/512 Native American ancestry – and therefore “Native American”
Those same tests say that I – one of the most northern European people I know, and proud of it – am between 1/64 and 1/256 African-American.
If I were to use my “African-American heritage” to get preferential treatment, including prestigious academic appointments, based on a genetic sample like that, not only would people mock and taunt me, I would mock and taunt myself. And I would deserve it.
Please, my Democrat friends – nominate this woman for president in 2020.
Especially those on the left who consider the way things are today an “emergency”. It’s a laden term:
Those familiar with the political career of Indira Gandhi will have a special appreciation for the concept of “emergency.” The Emergency refers to a 21-month period during which Mrs. Gandhi suspended civil liberties, ruled by decree, jailed political opponents, censored newspapers, and laid the foundations for what might have been a permanent dictatorship. Dissident political parties were banned, regional governments were dissolved and their leaders incarcerated. (The Malthusians never sleep: India also set on a course of involuntary sterilization during this period, as a means of population control.) There had been political unrest and political violence (as, unhappily, there long had been in India), but the proximate cause of the Emergency was the fact that Mrs. Gandhi had lost a court case that might have resulted in her being removed from office. The Emergency was the fact that there was political opposition to her government, and that the opposition was effective.
Our situation is not quite so stark, but it is analogous. Longstanding American institutions ranging from the First Amendment to the Electoral College to the Senate have been suddenly and rashly declared “illegitimate.” Why? Because, at the moment, they are keeping the Left from getting what it wants. The Left wants to silence certain right-wing critics and dissidents, and the First Amendment stops them. The Senate and the Electoral College perform their intended constitutional role in protecting the interests of the less-populous states and their residents, ensuring the protecting of minority interests from the tyranny of the majority. This annoys the would-be tyrants. (They are, to their discredit, unable to truly appreciate that political tides turn, and that majorities are fickle things.) The ordinary political processes of the United States have produced results that the Left does not like, and, hence, those processes and the institutions that enable them must be considered illegitimate. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is to be understood as a national emergency because . . . Democrats would prefer to have somebody else, and they believe they having something like a divine right to rule.
And one can only hope that it’s their eventual undoing.
Daniel McCarthy at American Spectator noticed the same thing about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that I do about every single “Protect” Minnesota rally; Where are you ends, and the participants, or almost exclusively upper middle class Caucasians. The few African-Americans there are either from Allied political groups there for the optics, or people like Senator Kamala Harris, Who is political career is largely floated by… White liberals.
But the Democratic voters out there yelling about Kavanaugh were as white as any country club gathering of Republicans. They looked like a line of Starbucks patrons — Caucasian, professional, largely millennial, with earth tones and earnest expressions aplenty. Men and women wore the same fashionable glasses and more or less the same clothes. It was a Pumpkin Spice Riot.
Where were the black Democrats? Where were the non-yuppies? Hillary Clinton could have asked the same questions on November 9, 2016, after she failed to get them to show up for her the way they’d showed up for Barack Obama. That election, like the Kavanaugh protest, showed that white liberalism has a problem: it’s too liberal for a majority of whites, yet too distant from the concerns of most non-whites. But its proponents enjoy so much cultural prestige as liberals and so much self-confidence as part of a historic white majority — however much they may disdain such a thing — that they failed to recognise alienated they are from everyone else. They see themselves as the natural moral arbiters of society. But nobody else sees them that way. Nothing says that a multiracial or multicultural society has to be politically centre-left, after all. India has a right-wing nationalist and religious fundamentalist government. Brazil looks set to elect a right-wing president in a runoff later this month. Yet white American liberals cling to the belief that demographic magic will rescue them from the insufficiency of their ideology appeal. White liberalism is in fact in more trouble in this country than conservatism is. The only places where white liberals values matter are in elite cultural institutions — which is why getting Kevin Williamson fired from The Atlantic is a lot easier than getting senators to vote against confirming Kavanaugh.
In of movement dominated by magical thinking, it’s no surprise that magical thinking about them selves would be part of the deal.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is waiting for the train at University and Hamline.
Suddenly, a group of 20 through 60-something women with protest signs and pink “feline” caps rushes across the street, waving signs and chanting chants. One of them is Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, a twenty-something graduate of Saint Olaf, and of Camp Wellstone. She works as a telemarketer for “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”.
She notices BERG.
BIRKENSTOCK (Loudly, aggressively): Merg!
BERG: Um, hi, Moonbeam…
BIRKENSTOCK: Women are strong! We are invincible! A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle! We will eclipse masculinity! We will smash the patriarchy!
BERG: Huh. So women who make any sort of claim of abuse…
BIRKENSTOCK: Must be believed without question or reservation!
BERG: Huh. You don’t think that’s already a big contradic…
(But BIRKENSTOCK has already run down the platform, joining a mob stomping on a roll of MEN-tos.
Oh, boy. I think we know why this person isn’t a business owner.
I just think about my own job on this. Imagine your nurse showing up late or leaving early because she biked. Imagine morale amongst the co-workers who don’t have that luxury to bike, but have kids to pick up from school or other obligations, yet they need to cover the bicyclist’s 40 minutes of non-work. But, hey, I hope she does actually try to start a business. She might learn a lot.
She’ll have a flat tire and miss the grand opening.
Silicon Valley – and its various satellites around the country, including whatever software design culture that exists in the Twin Cities – has trended left of center for a long, long time (although not forever; it used to be fairly libertarian – a change that’s been a net loss for everyone).
That’s changed, of course; when James Damore was fired at Google for the high crime of pointing out the patently obvious about Google’s internal political culture – think Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – it surprised absolutely nobody that’d been following the way the Bay Area’s software development culture has been evolving.
An engineer at Facebook has started a conservative group. Which is big news. David French notes:
…the internal conservative revolt at Facebook may — just may — represent one of the most consequential news developments of the year. A senior engineer named Brian Amerige posted a short statement on Facebook’s internal message board. It began with words that will ring true to employees at hundreds of major American corporations and academic institutions:
We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.
We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically. HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity,” and “equality.” On this issues [sic], you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.
Amerige invited colleagues to join a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity” and — as the New York Times reports — more than 100 employees have joined. It’s a small fraction of the Facebook workforce, but it’s enough that it can’t be easily squelched.
Indeed, the Times reports that angry colleagues have already tried to appeal to Facebook to shut down the group. So far, they’ve failed
This is something I wrestle with daily – at work (I work at a place with a bit of a political monoculture, as luck would have it, and suffice to say I’m not in the majority) and elsewhere in my life (I’ve changed my church affiliation, and the world of dating is rife with people who just can not tolerate the idea of being around someone whose politics challenge their own). Like most conservatives, I want my politics to stay in my mind, my news, and at the polling station; I don’t want it to eat my entire life.
Which is of course what Big Left wants, and needs; to divide and conquer an inchoate mass of individuals.
And so this is something to follow – and, let’s be honest, emulate in our daily lives.
74 years ago last month, a few tens of thousands of Poles, who’d survived under Nazi occupation for nearly five years, rose up against their occupiers. Armed with weapons they’d cached in 1939, or stolen, smuggled or, in many cases, made in “underground” shops (because the Nazis gave Poland “common sense gun laws!) and not much more outside pure guts, they launched the “Warsaw Uprising”, seizing much of Warsaw from the Nazis. By the way, we’re talking “Nazis” in the “tanks and flamethrowers and machine guns” sense of the term, not the “tiki torch-carrying cartoon” or “every Republican, according to some “progressives”” senses some are so fond of.
Had they not been betrayed by Stalin, it would have worked.
If you’re someone who’s angry about the last election and tweets / Facebooks about it on the way from pilates to Whole Foods – you’re a lot of things (practitioner of your First Amendment rights, sore loser, someone who may or may not really understand how federalsm and representative government works)…
…but you’re not “the resistance”. Better people than you or I earned that title the hard way – risking, and more often than not losing, their lives and those of their families to boot.
Oh, I know. It’s a free country. You can say anything you want about yourself.
Just don’t expect me not to mock and taunt you for it.
I think that’s all true – at least in directly. Because the writer is correct – it’s impossible to calculate the damage that government subsidy of art has done to, well, Art. And the Fringe Festival is often a great place to see what happens when society pays for way too many mediocre terrible artist to create too much “art”.
If you read a report of a hate crime, and it doesn’t involve unrelated witnesses, much less actual physical presence (to say nothing of physical contact), assume its a hoax first, then verify.
And, on verifying, almost invariably congratulate yourself on not being fooled!
I did that with this story. And most every one like it in the past 18 months.
A child’s job is to rebel against societal rules, customs and norms. A parent’s job is to enforce the rules, customs and norms so the child has something to rebel against. Eventually, we expect the child to grow up and begin to enforce the rules, customs and norms on her children. What if that doesn’t happen? Spare the rod and spoil the child? What if an entire generation is spared the rod?
Cast your mind back to the kind of society portrayed in the old television series “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best.” Now imagine a person are so completely opposed to that society that he wants to reverse every single thing about it, from the most frivolous details down to the most fundamental concepts. That’s the mission of Liberalism in America.
Remember when you were in junior high and some bully asked: “Do you want me to punch you?” so you said “no” and got punched anyway? “Ha ha ha, it’s Opposite Day!” Think of any rule, custom or anything that was normal in 1959 and flip it on it’s head. That’s the goal: Permanent Opposite Day.
Joe Doakes
Do you want your schools to be like a community theater production of Lord of the Flies? Do you want your colleges to be like banana republic dictatorships, and your city governments to be like college sociology classes run amok?
