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Darkly Optimistic
www.darklyoptimistic.susbtack.com
On one hand, I am mindful of the Penn State situation. You just didn’t want to believe that Papa Joe
Paterno allowed his assistant to do the things he did right under his
nose. Similarly, the abuse of women
athletes by Larry Nassar went on unabated under the noses of coaches, the AD,
the president of Michigan State and even the FBI. I’d hate to stay in a state of denial about
the athletic program of NU..
But something doesn’t smell right about any of this. There are signs everywhere that something
else is going on here. There was no
indication that Fitzgerald had any knowledge of inappropriate behavior. None of the behavior rose to a criminal level,
nor was there any indication that any of it could have caused physical
injury. It was mostly guys doing stupid,
tribal stuff.
Fitz himself has a sterling reputation among coaches. He is a real NU guy, bleeds purple and all
that. He has taken a bottom rung program,
and usually puts a credible team on the field, even though his kids actually
have to meet certain academic standards and pass classes. None of the student athletes that I came
into contact with ever had regrets about playing there. Northwestern’s football program boasted a 98%
graduation rate last year, and placed
first or second among FSB programs in the nation. Compare that to almost any other program in
the country, where players are treated like chattel. NU players
What has my Woke detector going off are several
factors. First, this started with the
school newspaper, a notoriously leftist bunch. Second, it was an attack writ
large on the entire athletic program. It
was not focused on a single incident or set of incidents, and the allegations
were unspecific, and stitched together from disparate corners. The baseball coach was criticized as creating
a “toxic atmosphere” (a/k/a demanding hard work and consistent performance). There were allegations of racist and sexist
comments. One coach was quoted as saying
that he didn’t want a young, pretty assistant on the sideline because it would
be distracting to the players (oh, recognizing the horrors of healthy, athletic
young men acting, like, well, normal healthy, athletic young men). Most suspicious was dragging a Mr. Diaz, a kid
that graduated in ’08 to claim he had PTSD from his treatment at NU. They couldn’t dig up old claim of sexual
impropriety on Fitz himself (see the experience of Joshua Katz at Princeton and
Roland Fryer at Harvard) so they fingered his players instead.
The weird way the president handled the whole affair raises
suspicions. Michael Schill had all the
facts available to him and decided to give Fitz a two week suspension. Then, apparently under some pressure from
somewhere, he reversed himself WITH NO NEW INFORMATION and fired Fitz,
consistent with the cowardly responses to Woke pressure that is the norm in
academia.
And now, the slip and fall lawyers have gotten into the
act. One notorious race baiting lawyer
is representing 8 players in a suit against the school and Fitz. Another, Pat Salvi has said he’s going after
the women’s programs.
When you put all the pieces together, the attack on NU athletics has all the
markings of a well-planned, coordinated effort to take down the entire athletic
program at NU. Who is leading this? We may never know. The lawsuits will all likely be settled quietly
and will not reveal much.
What do I think is really going on? Leftists hate competitive athletics. And they are sneaky. If you wanted to reduce NU’s athletic
presence to DIII, the proper thing to do would be to take it through the
trustees and have a vote. But that would
have met with resistance from some large donors.
So they decided to take this route. Attack the entire program with a potpourri
of Woke bugaboos: stitch together allegations
of racism, sexism and abuse to paint a picture of an inchoate “toxic
environment” with relatively minor
incidents. Drag out resentful people that graduated long ago. And then bring in the artillery- the
plaintiff’s lawyers to destroy the program.
Of course the big game trophy was the new planned football stadium which
will now never be constructed.
Yet another academic institution has allowed the radical
Left to take control because of the lack of backbone in its president.
It this short post, I’m going to find time to express how I
feel about the moment. But that has
absolutely nothing to do with culture.
The incomprehensible mishmash that Kamala Harris vomited up
to attempt to define culture is not just an indictment of her and her profound
ignorance, but of our entire educational system—top to bottom. Kamala Harris, a
heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris attended Howard University and then
the University of California Hastings College of Law. Harris is a seasoned lawyer but it is rare to
catch her uttering a coherent phrase.
Her statement on culture was her piece de resistance—complete and
utterly meaningless drivel, followed by her signature cackle.
But this week highlighted the profound ignorance not just of
her, but of two more high profile figures of the regime—White House
spokeslesbian Karine Jean-Pierre and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never fails
to induce a forehead slap. KJP, as she
is known, who adroitly dodges most questions that penetrate deeper than asking
what flavor ice cream Biden favors this week, asserted that the Supreme Court
took away a “fundamental Constitutional right” when it determined that
affirmative action was unconstitutional and a violation of equal
protection. AOC has been barking about
investigating and issuing subpoenas to SCOTUS judges all week. Taken together, the three of these
miseducated Marxists demonstrate a shocking lack of coherence in their rhetoric
and a complete lack of understanding of how the Republic functions. If they had any dignity at all, the
institutions that educated these half-wits would offer to turn in their
accreditations. I have for several
years served as a judge for a speech and debate event for homeschooled high
school kids, and I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that the least of
those 15 and 16 year olds would run circles around the Vice President, KJP and
AOC. I know. I grade them out. KJP struggles with basic sentence
construction and subject-verb agreement, a flaw that would not get her out of
the first round at our event.
But let me give Kamala a hand with culture, and what she
should have said.
Culture is an amalgam of human behaviors and practices that
are distinct to a subset of people. It
is manifested in their language, their song, religion, lore, their literature,
their cuisine. It is made up of hundreds
of mostly unwritten rules that govern how they relate to each other. It is most certainly NOT, as Kamala said, a
“reflection of our moment” (whatever that means). It is not the here and now, but is deeply
rooted in our past, connects us to past generations, and we should seek to pass
it on to future generations. It binds
groups of people together. It provides a
person with stability and a way of viewing the world. It is often the glue that holds people
together because it is a basis for predictability of behavior.
As a nation with a large immigrant population, most of us
have been exposed to a variety of cultures brought here from their home
countries. Before we got heavily into
the corrosiveness of identity politics, it was one of the best features of this
country. In many large cities, like my
own, you could drive a few blocks and get authentic Chinese, Jewish, Italian,
Soul Food, Mexican, or Indian. To be
sure, some cultures blended together better than others. Mexicans and Poles do well and there is a lot
of intermarriage between them. Greeks
and Lithuanians tend to be a little more insular. And we know that culture implies certain
behavioral tendencies. A Jewish deli in
Chicago’s North Shore proudly sells t-shirts with their logo on the front and
that proclaim on the back, “We’re Italian Jews.
That means we’re into food AND bickering.” It’s funny, because everyone knows there is
some truth to it. That’s culture.
While we are an amalgam of many different cultures, they
have been, and need to be, subordinate to American culture. And this is the point. There is a distinctly American culture that
Kamala and her posse are fighting against.
It is rooted in our unique past, and despite the attempt to deny and
dilute it by people like Kamala, it still burns within us, although the
globalists are working overtime to erase it.
American culture is fiercely independent, defiant,
go-it-alone. This is why we have a great
entrepreneurial spirit still. We have a
rough and tumble culture—and a violent one, at that. We do not depend on the State for our
protection. And despite attempts to
erase or supplant it, we are rooted in a great religious tradition. We are risk takers. It’s in our genes. Our pioneer spirit won’t be shackled. It is a can do spirit.
We are an optimistic,
forward-looking people, not stuck in the past.
That’s why reparations won’t work and victim culture will eventually
wither and die. Because it’s not
us.
And when it becomes intolerable, we move. We don’t wallow in our misery. We moved across an ocean when Europe became
intolerable. When the East Coast became
crowded, we said, “Go West, young man.”
Today, as certain states become more totalitarian and less responsive to
its citizens, we migrate away to freer places.
California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey are draining themselves,
leaving for Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
Kamala couldn’t be more wrong. Culture is not a reflection of our moment and
our time. It is who we have been, the
legacy of our forebears propelled into the future .
Harrington begins her heretical, heterodoxical book by
announcing its very first line, “What started me down the path towards writing
this book was feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby.”
This bold and unambiguous statement is a clear shot across
the bow, aimed at feminists that have successfully detached themselves from
their reproductive selves, through availability of birth control and, in many
jurisdictions, having the right to terminate their pregnancy up to the moment
of birth. In this opening sentence,
Harrington announces that she is about to take a sledgehammer to modern
feminist thought. There is no doubt that
she would get booed off the stage at most U.S. college campuses for making such
a statement.
Harrington’s views, it seems, involved a real life pivot. She admits that she had been swept up in
postmodernism and that she had a “visceral aversion to hierarchies.” Like Bridget Phetasy, she apparently had a
string of “loose, shifting, postmodern constellations of romantic
entanglements” that she found unsatisfying.
At the same time, her startup business venture failed and the crash of
’08 caused her to re-evaluate her life, and her role as a woman. It was then that she came to the conclusion
that “Progress Theology,” the notion that things can only get better as women
become more liberated was flawed, that the “pursuit of untrammeled freedom,
mindless hedonism or the final victory of one sex over another” was a
mirage. (I also highly recommend the
podcast discussion between Phetasy and Bret Weinstein on his Dark Horse Podcast
of October 31, 2022 dealing with many of the same issues):
Having come to this conclusion, Harrington makes a number of
astute observations about how we got to this point. She is no Phyllis Schafley, nostalgic for
the white picket fences and the Ozzie and Harriet 50’s. She goes much further.
She argues that during the industrial revolution, Big
Romance (of the Jane Austen type) helped achieve a sort of balance between the
sexes. Men had a monopoly over economic
resources and women had a monopoly over sexual resources. But as we moved into the 60’s and 70’s with
the ideas of Judith Butler’s ideas that sex and gender are social constructs
taking hold, feminism began to cause a real cleavage between men and women. As technology advanced, so did the
atomization of women and commoditization of sex, beginning with the pill (and
abortion), which separated sex from procreation.
“When individuals of both sexes really can just f**k, with no material
consequences, what is even the point of going out to dinner first?” she
decries.
What most resonated with me with Harrington’s book were two
things. First, her absolute bluntness
confronting the madness of the moment. Simple
truthful statements such as, “It is physiologically impossible to gestate a
baby without involving a woman” and her assertion that men and women have innate
natures directly contradicts Butler’s premise and the wave sweeping over the
country.
Second, Harrington’s position gives some context and
intellectual heft behind some of the women that are active dissidents against
the feminist movement--- authors Peachy Keenan (Catholic- 5 children and author
of Domestic Terrorist, Bethany Mandel (Jewish – 6 children and co-author with
Karol Markowitz of Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and
Indoctrinating a Generation). Like Harrington,
these women understand that motherhood—creating and nurturing human life is at
the core of their being and purpose in life.
They understand that human flourishing for a woman does not hinge on
liberating oneself from unchosen relationships and obligations, but often
involves finding meaning in them.
Harrington’s book helped me consolidate my thinking and some
of the recent thoughts of others, like Yoram Hazony in his book, Conservatism, A
Rediscovery, in which he asserts that in Jewish doctrinal thought, having and
nurturing children IS your purpose in life, and the earlier in life you get
that started the better. The
life-giving aspect of sex was always a touchstone of Catholic doctrine. It’s no coincidence that Peachy Keenan and
Bethany Mandel have 11 children between them, and it’s also no accident that
radical Leftists Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have none.
Harrington’s position that our roles need to be rolled back
to pre-industrial society harkens back to one of my favorite old films of all
time- Heartland with Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell (1979), where Torn hires
Ferrell to help him homestead on the plains and they end up in a functional
marriage, relying on each other to survive in harsh conditions. There was not a lot of romance, just
tackling challenges together and surviving in a harsh environment with no
outside help. That scenario may be a bit extreme, but you get the point.
More writers like Harrington are coming around to see the
false god of Butler’s feminism. We do
not become self-actualized when we are liberated from all non voluntarily chosen
relationships. Real adulthood and
flourishing arises from taking responsibility and caring for another living
being, primarily manifested in your own children.
It took me awhile to cotton to the idea of Donald Trump in
the White House in 2016. Like many, I
was put off by his brash, vain and unpolished style. But as a disaffected voter, I gave him a
second look during the convention when he announced, “I am your voice.” Like most Americans, I felt that Washington
had become completely unmoored from the electorate and that the country needed
someone that was not beholden to any particular interest group, someone that
could shake things up. And Trump delivered
on a multitude of fronts, from curtailing the bureaucracy, to pushing back on
China, to browbeating the Germans into stepping up their defense commitments,
to killing Soliemeni, to the Abraham Accords, Trump showed some real moxi and
courage to do some things that needed to be done. His greatest gift was spotlighting the
necrosis that had settled in D.C. and the toxicity of the press. At the outset of Trum’s presidency,
cartoonist Scott Adams correctly predicted that, “Trump will do a lot of things
you like. But it won’t be cost free.” I was along for the ride, but fully expected
to tire of him at some point.
I have tried very hard to view Trump differently and be
neither an acolyte or a Trump hater, and assess his performance fairly and
within a historical context. It is
enormously difficult to make fair judgments about him, as the media and the
agencies distort and lie, and most of my friends and acquaintances fell into
either camp.
Again, as this election cycle begins, I have some misgivings about Trump, and I try to
organize them here.
Age
While we are focused on the age and infirmity of Joe Biden, his obvious
descent into dementia that is frightening given the challenges we face
internationally, but Trump is 76. I have
great trepidation that we are descending into an ossified gerontocracy just as
the Soviets did just before its collapse.
As someone that is north of 60, I understand that our job now is to
prepare the next generation to take the reins.
It’s their country, or will be soon.
We are being led by Dementia Joe (80), Chuck Schumer (72), and until
recently Nancy Pelosi (83). Dianne
Feinstein (89) is still clinging to her job as is Chuck Grassley(89). While he is still vibrant and energetic, this
nation seriously needs these elderly scions to step down and make room for the
next generation.
Personnel
This is a tough one because Trump, as an outsider, didn’t quite know
who to trust, and he is particularly bad at hiring lawyers. Five minutes with Michael Cohen should have
been enough to determine that Cohen was something you would fish out of the
bathtub drain trap. Same for Anthony
Scaramucci. He also failed to fire
people that he should have dismissed much, much earlier—Jim Mattis, for
one. And the most costly for Trump and
the nation—Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Jim Comey. Taken together, those three inflicted more
harm on the country than a nuclear explosion in a medium sized city.
Perhaps one of Trump’s worst flaws is his failure to discern
people to whom he owes some loyalty.
Sure, Jim Mattis, John Bolton and Bill Barr turned on him. But he threw Michael Flynn to the wolves from
the outset, and disparaged Steve Bannon (whether you like him or not). His recent disparagement of Kayleigh McEnany. She stood by him, was smart and well
prepared, and faced the hyenas in the press corp day after day. Trump had no business publicly rebuking her.
Discipline
Trump has very good instincts, especially in foreign policy. But his lack of discipline has been very
costly. He picks fights with people that
he doesn’t need to engage with. He prides
himself in being a great counterpuncher—and he is. But the forces arrayed against him,
especially in the security agencies are formidable and smart. This most recent indictment was an unforced
error. Yes, this indictment is an aspect
of the abuse of the justice system to derail a presidential candidate, but
Trump opened the door with his carelessness. As was his criticism of DiSantis for how
Florida handled Covid. Trump
unnecessarily alienated white suburban women, a constituency that would likely
have pushed him over the top in 2020 had he moderated just a bit.
So yes, these are defensible reasons to dump Trump. And I’m sure there are others that I have
missed. As a fiscal conservative, I can
also argue that he did not pay enough attention to spending and the deficit as
I would have liked.
But none of these possible objections matter now. After the indictment of Trump, an obvious
political move to take him off the game board, attempting to deprive the
American citizens of making their own decisions on him.
It’s fair game to raise issues of Trump’s sloppy handling of
some documents. But to prosecute Trump
for the same things Clinton has done, Obama has done, and Biden has done is a
bridge too far. And that’s only the
beginning. The Clinton influence
peddling and money laundering through the Clinton Foundation, the Biden family
corruption that took those techniques and raised them to a new level, filtering
funds through a labyrinth of entities to enrich his family…and of course, the
infamous Biden laptop. Add to it the
financing of BLM and Antifa and we can see that equal application of the law
has completely broken down.
I am not alone. There
are millions of people like me, that see Trump’s positive attributes as well as
his deficiencies. The decision of
whether to put him back in the White House belongs to us, not the Department of
Justice, or any local petty DA.
As the jackals in the corrupt justice system, media and in
his own party (Haley, Christie) circle to take him out, he may be the only
leader strong enough to push back on the Deep State and the Marxism that have a
stranglehold on D.C.
In normal times, there would be enough reasons to turn to
someone else. Now is not that time.
While Wokeness has made some inroads at The University of
Chicago (it recently graced Critical Race Theory with its own department – Race,
Diaspora and Indigeneity), it remains one of the few places where those
conversations can take place in public. Last
weekend, I returned to campus at the University of Chicago for a debate between
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry
Krazner (now being impeached by the Pennsylvania legislature) moderated by
University of Chicago law professor Emily Underwood. Before I get into some of the content, let me
just say that for all my dismay over the direction of the school over the past
three years, the discussion was conducted in a very civil and respectful
manner. Early on, a few in the audience
made some noises but Underwood moderator was quick to tamp it down, and it did
not recur. Despite dipping its toes in
the Wokeness waters, The University of Chicago more or less adheres to the
Chicago Principles of Free Speech. Ms. Underwood remarked that, “The one thing
that we can all agree on is that The University of Chicago changed all of us.”
Krazner opened by rationalizing the horrendous incident at
Stanford a few weeks ago in which some Stanford law students shouted down Judge
Kyle Duncan, with some students shouting such vile things at him as “I hope
your daughter gets raped.” In the
incident the school’s DEI instructor took the microphone and admonished the
judge, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
In other words, was it worth having him speak? Krazner trashed the Federalist Society (who
sponsored the event), the judge for “taking away rights” and for his non-Ivy
League credentials, stating “he has no business being on the 5th
circuit” and “doesn’t look judicial” and managed to smear Florida governor
DiSantis along with him. He reluctantly admitted
a few students went too far but did not deserve suspension or expulsion.
Turley’s initial response was simply, “Wow” then went on
calmly to admonish Krazner for rationalizations that go back centuries. There is a long history of making excuses for
silencing others. “Speech is harmful”
allows for endless tradeoffs ending in the government’s labeling of
misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (true speech used to
mislead). Turley’s flat declaration was
that the solution to bad speech is good speech.
He considers the current attack on free speech to be the greatest threat
to the country. He characterized
Krazner’s core argument as “the students went too far but it was his [Duncan’s]
fault.
Turley said that we were living in an “age of rage” but that
rage is addictive, giving us a license to silence others. This country was born in rage and silencing
others is a troubling trend. It is the
most intolerant environment he has ever seen.
On almost all college campuses, conservative and libertarian faculty,
which were always in the minority, have been largely excluded entirely.
Krasner further downplayed the Stanford incident, claiming that
an incident is not a trend. But Turley shot
back that there have been many than one incident and he tracks them. The data do no support Krasner’s defense.
Krazner then attacked the Supreme Court itself, with a claim
that the court is taking back rights, that it has become polarized and
politicized, and people have lost a lot of faith in the court. He cited “absurd” decisions about the 2nd
Amendment and railed about not adhering to precedent and kicking stare decisis
to the curb. He complained about the
undue influence of the Federalist Society on the court and the “trickery” that
was used to keep Merrick Garland off the bench.
Turley countered by stating that he had a lot of faith in
the system, that Krazner misportrays the court. In the vast majority of the
cases, the decisions are unanimous. “The
justices are not robotic idealogues,” he said., “Furthermore, we want judges to
be intellectually consistent.” He disagreed with the characterization of the
court taking away rights. Rather, these
decisions involve collisions of rights.
As the stare decisis, he commented tongue in cheek that “thankfully
Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) is still good law.” He reminded Krazner that the Warren Court
overturned 30 precedents and no one at the time claimed that was a threat to
democracy.
My bias clearly is in favor of Turley and I make the
following observations about the program:
·
Turley went out of his way to express his
fidelity to the Constitution, rather than a political party. “I haven’t liked a president since
Madison.” Turley did not even mention
Biden and only mentioned Trump in the context of discussions of the appropriateness
of impeachment.as a remedy (Turley, by the way, opposes Krazner's impeachment). At no point
did Turley disparage “liberals” or Democrats as a whole or any members of the
Supreme Court. He went out of his way to
make complimentary comments about Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. Krazner, on the other hand, ripped into the
Federalist Society, and the right wing of the court. His account of the
incident at Stanford in which he smeared Judge Duncan and excused the Stanford
law students for the shoutdown was utterly disingenuous. Duncan had a right to
speak without the “heckler’s veto.”
Period.
·
Krazner boasted that he was the first
progressive DA (Soros) and that the progressive DA’s now serve 20% of the U.S.
population and will soon expand to 30%.
He rambled on about the criminal justice complex, claiming that in areas
like Pennsylvania which lost its steel industry, that has been replaced by the
prison industry, disproportionately affecting blacks. He conveniently failed to address the crime
surge in his district and the excess deaths by violence as a consequence of his
posture.
Later in the day, I ran into Turley at the bookstore and had
an opportunity to have a chat with him, and I thanked him for his work on free
speech matters. He completed my “world
tour” of free speech scholars – Turley, Nadine Strosser (formely of ACLU) and Jason
DiSanto (Northwestern).
And while I enjoyed speaking with Turley, the most
interesting conversation I had that afternoon was with a HVAC technician. As I returned to my car, I passed two
maintenance guys- a white 50ish fellow having a cigarette break and a 30
something black fellow. They saw my
alumni badge and the older fellow said “Welcome back.” So I stopped and engaged them in conversation
for a bit. The older fellow had to take
a call and I continued with the younger guy, and we talked about careers. I told him I was less committed to college as
the right path as I once was and he lit up and told me about his own
journey. He went to a Chicago Public
High School (CVS) and grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes. He talked about the fact that CPS stopped offering
vocational classes and he thought that was a huge mistake, “Why go to college
when you can become an apprentice, make money right away and not have loans to
deal with?” We talked for a good half
hour about this. I felt so encouraged by
this conversation. I had more in common
with this young black man from the projects than I did with the smug, bombastic
Larry Krazner.
The civilized debate between Turley and Krazner and the
conversation with young maintenance guy left me with more hope than I have felt
in awhile. Free speech survives in this
redoubt, along with a bright young man from the projects that now has a bright
future in front of him.
Rochelle Walensky
Rochelle Walensky took over for Robert Redfield in January of 2021- about a
year into the pandemic. An early
advocate of the vaccines, she falsely claimed that if you took the jab, you
wouldn’t get it and couldn’t transmit the virus. Playing fast and loose with data, she failed
to distinguish deaths caused by COVID and deaths with COVID. Caving to pressure from teachers unions,
Walensky advocated school shutdowns as well.
One of my first impressions of Walensky came in March of
2021, as she addressed the nation in a halting voice, barely holding back
tears,
“I’m going to pause here. I’m going to lose the script, and
I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much
promise and potential where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now, I’m scared.”
My immediate reaction was, “What kind of leadership is
that?”
What followed throughout her tenure was data distortion,
flat out lies about the efficacy of the jab and policy recommendations that de
facto had the weight of law that inflicted devastation on our business
community, our education system, the military, and the mental health of tens of
millions of Americans. We still don’t have a good number reflecting how many
individuals died from COVID, rather than with COVID.
Most notoriously, Walensky asserted that vaccinated
individuals could not transmit the virus, and that was patently untrue. Her CDC advocated vaccinations for children
and healthy young people while ignoring the evidence that myocarditis resulting
from the vaccine was more of a risk for young men than the virus.
Walensky will never be held accountable for her lies,
distortions and bad calls. The damage
she inflicted on our society will linger for generations.
Mark Milley
While Rochelle Walensky inflicted incredible harm to our
society, particularly our youth, Mark Milley damaged our standing in the world,
emboldened our enemies, and, in an act of treason, upended the chain of
command. Like Walensky, he will never
be held accountable. Our enemies are now
laughing at us.
Milley jumped into the political fray in 2020 when he
accompanied President Trump to the burned out St. John’s church after mobs
nearly stormed the White House, then issued a statement saying that he regretted
it, and should not have been there. His
caving to political pressure was the first sign that all is not well with the
military top brass.
The most egregious blunder was his admission that he had
placed a call to his Chinese counterpart to tell him that he would give him a
heads up if Trump ordered an attack because the Chinese were worried about a
U.S. attack. He also blocked Trump’s
ability to use nuclear weapons. In our
system of government, those are not Milley’s calls to make. His job is not to
de-escalate with the Chinese. His job is
to serve the commander in chief. No one
elected him. Subverting the chain of
command is a treasonous offense, plain and simple. In an earlier era, Milley would have faced a
firing squad instead of a fat pension.
His statements about “white rage,” permitting drag queens to
perform on military bases, and his halt of operations so that the military
could purge “extremists” belied a top brass more interested in being Woke than
defending the nation.
Milley’s judgment was borne out by his results. He said he was surprised that the Afghan army
folded so quickly. Well, Mr. Milley, we
pay you not to get surprised by military developments. That is a vital aspect of the job. Of course, there is the matter of leaving
billions worth of equipment on the ground to be picked up and used by the
Taliban and bartered in the international arms trade. His second mistake in
judgment was assuming that Kiev would fold in a matter of weeks. Here we are, over a year later and the
Ukrainians have held off Putin’s forces so far.
Permitting the Chinese spy balloon to traverse the U.S.
skies unharassed, collecting sensitive military data was his last most
pusillanimous act. American citizens
were nonplussed as reports came in and people actually saw it, and the military
did nothing until it had completed its mission and was over the Atlantic. Of
course, the administration offered a variety of excuses for its inaction but
the fact remains that neither China or Russia would have permitted this over
their territory.
The consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal and Chinese
spy balloon debacles will take a generation to remediate, if they ever can be,
thanks to Milley. But Milley will suffer
no adverse consequences from the harm he has caused.
When history is written, historians will undoubtedly record
these two, along with the notorious Anthony Fauci, as the three actors that did
the most damage to the American experiment.
And if America does indeed crumble, they will be seen as some of the
major architects of its demise.
