Why I Worry

In May of 2017, after the bombing of the concert in Manchester, UK, where teen girls were killed and maimed by an Islamic terrorist, I wrote a post Our Children (https://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html).  That post was my most read post on my blog.  In it, I asserted that a civilization that lacks the will to protect and nurture its children is in deep trouble.

My fears have not been allayed, and rather have gotten much worse.  The very institutions that have been set up to protect children have either been hijacked to exploit them, or have enabled their exploitation.  

First, in a stunning decision, a Detroit judge ruled that a federal law under which Muslim doctors were performing female genital mutilations were prosecuted was unconstitutional, stating “as laudable as the prohibition of a particular type of abuse of girls may be, it does not further the goal of protecting children on a nondiscriminatory basis.”  Of course, the defense attorneys in that case argued their position on 1^st amendment grounds --- freedom of religion.  In Judge Friedman’s eyes, not discriminating against a barbaric religious practice trumps the protection of these girls.  The judge relied on the commerce clause to throw out the charges, reasoning that their practice did not involve interstate commerce that could be regulated by the federal government.  But some of the girls were brought in from Minnesota, and if growing wheat on your own land that you sell in state (Wicker v. Filburn) is interstate commerce, how can your business of disfiguring girls from another state not be?  This decision is yet another instance of our legal system bending over backwards to accommodate this most barbaric and medieval procedure practiced in some corners of Islam.  Ironically, the ACLU teamed up with Maine Democrats to defeat a measure which would have made female genital mutilation illegal in Maine, arguing that it was already covered by federal law.  So much for that.  This most misogynist practice must be driven from our land, utterly, entirely and without question and citizens who engage in its practice need to be jailed and noncitizens deported. 

Also this week, former Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon was charged with 2 felonies and 2 misdemeanors for lying to investigators in the Larry Nassar abuse case.  It will be recalled that Nasser sexually abused dozens of young female athletes at MSU while serving as a team physician.  Last May, the university reached a $500 million settlement with the 332 victims (the Wall Street Journal reported that a bankruptcy filing was considered to deal with the claims).  Simon knew.  Other people working in the athletic department knew (including a gymnastics coach that was also charged.  Many of those are still working at MSU. 

The primary purpose of a university is to educate and shape young people so they can flourish in adult life.   The entire structure at MSU failed to protect these young female athletes from this monster, who will now carry the scars of Nassar’s abuse for the rest of their lives.   Most infuriating about this whole sick episode in higher education is that it was a female leader of an institution that enabled the exploitation of young women.

Finally, the Vatican is at it again.  Months after Cardinal McCarrick resigned amidst the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the grand jury report concerning the Pittsburgh Archdiocese was released, the Vatican blocked an effort by U.S. bishops to put forward a plan to curb abuse, ordering them to wait.  Wait for what, exactly?  A better plan by a Vatican that honored Cardinal Law?

Worse, in Chicago, Cardinal Cupich downplayed the furor by arrogantly dismissing it, “We have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this.”   Again, what bigger agenda?  What could possibly be more important and urgent than protecting our children?

I do not wish to take on the role of Chicken Little, but you can see that our societal structures whose MOST IMPORTANT PURPOSE is to protect young people are failing them miserably, and indeed have become vehicles through which they are being exploited and abused.

If this corruption is not addressed, it does not bode well for us.

Home and Abroad

I had an interesting couple of days back to back last week as I attended small gatherings to hear former Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee and Middle East scholar Dr. Daniel Pipes speak.

I first came across Daniel Pipes as an undergraduate at The University of Chicago.  Pipes taught World History with the great William H. McNeill (who recently passed away) and is the son of Richard Pipes (also recently deceased), Soviet expert and former Reagan advisor.  Daniel Pipes gained notoriety after 9/11 as he had been sounding the alarm bell over radical Islam long before.  Indeed, the person that introduced Pipes opined, “If the world had listened to Dr. Pipes, there may not have been a 9/11.”

Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum, an “activist” think tank, devoted largely to Middle East politics and social developments and Islamism.  Soft spoken, understated, and very academic, Pipes contrasts sharply with Goolsbee and probably gets less media attention as a result.  His quiet voice forces one to listen carefully and in our case, was even sometimes a little hard to hear over the clatter of the servers serving lunch.  

Here is a brief summary of Dr. Pipes’s insights:

• ·        The furor over the murder of journalist Khashoggi will die down and will have minimal effect on U.S. Saudi relations.  Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian regime and MBS is instituting reforms that will take time to implement.
• ·        Turkey is lost.   Pipes called it Iran 2.0 and said that he can travel to Iran without fear but if he traveled to Turkey, he would be immediately arrested.   Erdogan made some good decisions over the first 7 years of his tenure but has made mistake after mistake over the last 7.  He has completely shut down all freedom of speech in that country and schools have now become Islamist.
• ·       “No one is paying attention, but South Korea is falling apart, but that is a topic for another day.” Pipes dropped that bomb but did not elaborate.
• ·     While they need to improve, the former Eastern Bloc countries are “generally moving in the right direction.”  While the MSM has criticized those governments as anti-democratic and far right, Pipes refers to them as “civilizationist,” protecting their sovereignty and culture.
• ·       As to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Pipes asserts that the Islamic world is fractured in their approach to Israel.  As to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he believes Israel should adopt a “Israel wins, they lose” approach.  Wars end when one side stops the fighting, and not before.  He blames the Israeli security establishment for the current state of affairs as they are not willing to take the aggressive steps needed to end the conflict and win.  “They supply their enemies with food, electricity and fuel [during the fighting].  Who does that for an enemy?”
• ·        Pipes also noted that the left in America has become pro-Palestine while the right is pro-Israel.  This is causing problems among American Jews since they vote 80% Democratic.  Indeed the new Muslim congresswoman, celebrated by the MSM waived a Palestinian flag at her victory party and announced that she was representing the Palestinians.
• ·      The Middle East Forum has been attempting to bring Tommy Robinson to the U.S. to speak, and assisted in gaining his release from prison.  Robinson, it will be recalled, was jailed for speaking out in front of a British courtroom regarding the Muslim “grooming gang” members that were on trial.

As if on cue, just a couple of days later, the MSM criticized the Polish Independence Day parade as being too right wing and too nationalist and rockets began raining down on Israel from Gaza.

Goolsbee is almost a mirror image of Pipes, less scholarly, more flamboyant, and funny ----his timing is perfect.  Goolsbee was Obama’s economic advisor and is a regular on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox.  He is a perfect foil for Hannity and Hannity even lets him talk from time to time.

Goolbee is no fan of Trump’s but admitted that his forecast for growth was off.  He believes the growth spurt is temporary as the stimulative effect of the business tax cut and deficits run their course.

On politics, he believes that it is possible that Trump and the new Democratic House can work together to get an infrastructure bill done, but if the Democrats start to lawyer up and commence lawsuits and subpoenas, nothing will get done for two years.  The House also has the power to drag Trump’s agency heads in for endless hearings.

Perhaps Goolbee’s most interesting insights related to the Federal Reserve, the labor market and local conditions.  He said that the unwinding of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in addition to the rate increases will, at some point, become too much for the economy to handle.  Most recessions are caused by overly aggressive Federal Reserve rate increases and that the Fed unwinding adds 35 to 50 basis points to the already increasing rates.

As to the labor market, Goolsbee believes that the unemployment rate is outmoded and artificially low.  During the recession, record numbers of people simply exited the labor market and went on disability.  With a 3.7% unemployment rate, we should have started to see wage increases but we haven’t yet.  He posits that it is because workers are still “coming off the bench” back into the labor market.

Finally, on the local level, Goolsbee said that despite our debt, he did not believe that the U.S. has become Greece.   However, he said that “while the U.S. is not Greece, Illinois might be.” 

So, I had a fascinating view of the economy and the world, compacted into 24 hours from two excellent commentators that come from different ends of the political spectrum.  It was most gratifying to reconnect in person with Dr. Pipes after sitting in his class so long ago.

Words and Phrases- Language of Postmodernists

One of the skills that the Left has acquired (and which Donald Trump is equally or more adept at) is branding and framing via the use of a short word or phrase.   That technique is useful because with a single vacuous utterance, you are able to destroy a more analytical evaluation and you put your adversary on the defensive.  Trump demonstrated his acumen at this during the 2016 campaign with “Crooked” Hillary, “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “Low Energy” Jeb.   And it is one of the reasons liberals despise him.

The Left has developed a series of these monikers that are highly effective  and, like barnacles, they stick for awhile and it takes some effort to scrape them off.  “Privilege,” especially “white privilege” is the most prevalent.  Never mind that many of us know lots of white people that hardly had privileged lives.  They are all swabbed with the same mop.   “Toxic masculinity” is another.  Never mind that good old fashioned raw physical masculinity comes in real handy in real desperate straights as wonderfully depicted in the film The 15:17 to Paris, when a group of toxically masculine young men thwarted an armed terrorist.   In less extreme cases, toxic, undeterred masculinity is useful when you get a flat in -below zero weather on a dark highway and the grizzled guy from the service station shows up with his jack.

But no other vacuous phrase is quite as insidious as “of color,”  which is used to categorize any person of non-caucasian ancestry.   To the Leftist postmodernists, the term “of color” automatically connotes someone who, through their heritage, has been oppressed and is at a structural disadvantage in our society, and therefore, those individuals deserve special treatment to level the playing field.  It lumps together Hispanics and African Americans on the opposite side of whites and is the companion phrase to “white privilege.”  It obliterates the old descriptive terms- “White,” “Hispanic,” “Black” or “African American,”  “Asian,” “Native American,”  which were perfectly functional when necessary and instead puts whites on one side and lumps African American and Hispanics on the other.

The term “Person of Color” is a sneaky, divisive term concocted by the Left to further identity politics and should be wholly rejected.  It adds nothing to our society and culture and unnecessarily builds walls between us.

The underhanded appearance of this term became clear to me after I heard Kenneth B. Morris, the descendant of the great Frederick Douglass speak last summer.  Morris spun out stories and his family connection to Douglass, told anecdotes of his escape, reminded us that African slaves were inhumanly beaten, abused, and hunted down like animals.  Mr. Morris reminded us that the existence of black slavery was not that long ago, really.  Those were his people.  That was his heritage.  It was awful and remains a dark spot on American history.

But the working class neighborhood I grew up in consisted largely of Eastern European and Mexican.  And many of the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts of my peers were Poles and Lithuanians that escaped from the Stalinist Eastern Bloc.   The best friend of my best friend’s father was shot in the head in front of him at age 17.  He himself escaped by hiding in sewers and ditches for weeks.  Another friend’s parents escaped one of Stalin’s concentration camps in Lithuania and were hunted by Russian thugs with guard dogs.  My neighborhood was replete with those first hand stories of Communist oppression, and are most vividly captured in Ruta Sepetys’s novel Between Shades of Gray. Those were my people.  And that is my heritage.  Mr. Morris and I have more in common than at first appears.

The Lithuanian and Polish immigrants share a great deal more with African American than with Hispanics.  To be sure, they were oppressed at different times by different people.  But if you are suffering the terror of chased through the woods by people with guns, truncheons, and dogs with your heart racing, those experiences are quite the same whether it is a plantation owner or a Stalinist thug..  None of the Hispanics suffered oppression of that nature at all.  They simply migrated up here and took blue collar jobs and scratched out a living like the rest of the neighborhood.

That is why I utterly reject “Persons of Color” as an artificial, unhelpful and damaging construct.  It gets the categories completely wrong, unless you want to have a discussion of skin pigmentation. But if you wish it to connote the actual experiences of a peoples, it is meaningless and misleading.

The photo above is of a Soviet work camp.   Looks pretty similar to a 1850’s Georgia plantation, doesn’t it?

Projection

As we head into the midterms this week, another phenomena has me puzzled and disturbed—the blatant racism and antiSemitism manifested by the Left.   And this is not just an isolated incident.  It is occurring across all fronts—in academia, the MSM, social media and among politicians.   It is as if the Left has been granted a license to engage openly in this kind of thing.  And all the while accusing Trump and anyone that voted for him racist and bigoted.

I first raised this issue last fall when the New York Times published a repulsive op-ed by Ekow Yankah entitled “Can My Children Be Friends With White People?”  In it, Yankah says he’s going to teach his children not to trust white people.  Breathtaking in its blatant racism, the essay was utterly contrary to all of the messages of the great Martin Luther King.

But fast forward less than a year, and the same New York Times hired Sarah Jeong as an editor, whose social media posts included such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “#cancelwhitepeople.”

Just a few weeks ago, Georgetown law professor Christine Fair tweeted out that “white GOP senators deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine. Yes.”

Last week, Don Lemon of CNN claimed that, “the biggest terror threat is white men.”

It’s pretty clear that the Left believes it has a license to demonize and categorize white men in ways that we have never seen before and in ways that would not be permissible to do to other segments of our society.

But it doesn’t end with white men.  Last week, in a flippant attempt at a “joke,” when an interviewer confused Eric Holder and Cory Booker, exclaimed, “they all look alike.”  As Freud asserted, “There are no jokes.”  Such a statement would get any other person banished from the airwaves.

And when Kanye West showed signs of getting too cozy with Trump, CNN commentator Bakari Sellers said, “Kanye West is what happens when negroes don’t read.”

Most insidious and dangerous is the antiSemitism that has crept into our culture under the cloak of the “free Palestine” movement, and has been embraced by the Democratic party.

Just a few months ago, Democratic icon Bill Clinton appeared on the same stage with antiSemite Louis Farrakhan.  Photos have emerged of the grinning jackass Farrakhan with Eric Holder and Barack Obama.  Farrakhan recently referred to Jews as “termites” and has a long history of making vicious antiSemitic statements.  Yet no Democrat has condemned him and while Twitter suspended more benign commenters such as James Woods and former Reagan assistant secretary Paul Craig Roberts, Farrakhan is able to send his sick messages out with impunity.

But the license to engage in racism and antiSemitism is not limited to politicians and media. In a shocking and grotesque product rollout, Ben & Jerry’s introduced a new flavor of ice cream, “Pecan Resistance” and featured none other than Sharia-touting anti-Semite hate monger (and Farrakhan pal) Linda Sarsour.  The Ben & Jerry’s product announcement came just days after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that massacred 11 Jews.  Ben & Jerry’s then immediately chose to associate Linda Sarsour with its brand. 

Comments and acts like these would have been met with repercussions a decade ago, but apparently are fine now.  And that’s a very dangerous thing.