Thank God It's Over Pt. 1

 

Like most of you, I am eager to put 2021 behind me.  It was a strange and disorienting year, one in which we nearly completed two years of “15 days to flatten the curve,” the Biden Administration took over the reins of government, Afghanistan collapsed, inflation reared its ugly head with a vengeance, cities were wracked by rampant crime, CRT demonstrated how embedded they were in our educational system and China threatened us with hypersonic nuclear missiles.  Trump’s exit from government did not heal our divisions.

It would be easy to fall into hopelessness and despair.

But I am rather hopeful.   COVID19 and CRT seem intractable in our society but I see some very positive developments.   That is why my year end post will be a little different that I have posted in previous years.

2021 was the year of The Great Realignment.

COVID19 changed our patterns of living, as did the unchecked crime in urban areas.  And the false religion of CRT changed our relationships with many established institutions.   We woke up one morning to find that we could not go to the office, and now we are in the process of being barred from restaurants, bars and public places unless we have a government approved vaxx pass.  We also woke up to find that our liberal institutions—the media, higher education, and K-12 education systems are not liberal at all.  They had been transformed into propaganda centers, from which dissenters were exiled and publicly pilloried with the scary label, “RACIST!”  A society that barred religion from schools and the public square now embraced the new Woke religion, which had made its doctrine compulsory in schools and workplaces across the country.  Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion became omnipresent and if you so much as raised a skeptical eyebrow, you were… well, excluded.  Similarly, despite the very mixed results of the vaccines, the unvaccinated are also in the process of being marginalized, treated like lepers of biblical times.

Throughout history, totalitarians have enjoyed a tremendous first mover advantage.   But the pushback has begun in earnest, and it is gathering momentum.

In The Great Realignment, I have shifted away from organizations that have gone Woke.  I dropped my membership in the American Writers Museum as soon as it had a program featuring Kathy Griffin.  I punted the Newberry Library as soon as it held a Drag Queen Story Hour.  When The American Scholar featured “The Problem with Whiteness” as its cover article, I immediately canceled my subscription with a note, “There is no problem with Whiteness.”  When Loyola Academy decided to permit a large Black Lives Matter sign and begin allowing CRT into the curriculum, donations to that institution were halted.

Instead, I shifted my memberships, donations and subscriptions to the non-Woke.  Library of America gained a new member.  The Willa Cather Foundation did not go Woke, so I signed up (she is one of my favorite writers).  I moved my subscriptions to The Spectator and Backwoods Home magazines.  I dropped the N.F.L., N.B.A. and MLB and pivoted to golf and hiking instead, becoming more of a doer than a spectator.  Most significantly, I joined The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a grassroots organization aimed at restoring the principles of MLK (www.fairforall.org) and have attended several of its events. 

The Great Realignment also pushed me beyond the traditional Republican/Democrat or Conservative/Liberal dichotomies.   With the degradation of journalism, I sought out other avenues to hear what others have to say about the momentous events and changes that seemed to be occurring.

I found podcasts to be much more in depth, nuanced and intellectually honest that anything produced by institutional print, broadcast or social media.

Here are the podcasts that I regularly listen to:

-Dark Horse Podcast – Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a husband-wife team of evolutionary biologists that were run off by the Wokesters at Evergreen State and have a lot to say about the COVID19 pandemic, among other topics.

-Honestly with Bari Weiss- Another person canceled by the New York Times and now has her own substack and podcast.  She has displaced Terry Gross as the finest interviewer in the country.  Her September 8 interview with author Abigail Shier, Courage in the Face of Book Burners, is simply magnificent.

-New Discourses by James Lindsay- an in-depth explication of the Woke, CRT and Trans movements and their antecedents -Marxism, Maoism and Stalinism.  

-The Glenn Show- Podcast by Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury.  Glenn brings authenticity of his Chicago South Side roots to push back on Woke.  As an African-American from inner city Chicago, he brings a particularly poignant point of view to the fray.

-The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast- Back from his leave, Peterson had warned us about the dangers of post-modernism years ago.  

-The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad.  Like Peterson, Saad has been pushing back against the “Blue Hair People” for decades.  Like Bari Weiss, he is an excellent interviewer, and meets the challenge with humor and sarcasm rather than anger and bitterness.  His book, The Parasitic Mind was one of the best books I’ve read this year.   His most recent interviews with UChicago professor Dorian Abbot, Sociologist Goran Adamson and Dr. Janice Fiamengo are not to be missed.

Two of the writers that I most enjoy are:

Peachy Keenan, the non de plume of a young Catholic mom from California, who writes for americanmind.org.  Her writing is punchy, witty and sensible.  She is a more refined, less bitter, caustic and obnoxious version of Anne Coulter. 

Douglas Murray, author and defender of the West.  Murray has written The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp4XhZytdD0

As a rather traditional Christian Reagan pro-American conservative, I find it fascinating that two of the people that I pay attention to are Canadian- Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad and Douglas Murray is British.  And the podcasts I never miss are Honestly and Dark Horse, by two traditional liberals, Bari Weiss and Bret Weinstein.  This is a signal that there is a true realignment.  I find a much greater intellectual kinship with Weiss and Weinstein than most mainstream Republicans these days.

Crime and Punishment

 

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot visited LA and San Francisco to see how they handle smash-n-grab.  That’s a bit like sitting down with Elizabeth Holmes, formerly of Theranos to see how she did product development.

Major cities across the US are in the midst of a crime wave, enabled in large part by Woke DA’s whose elections were financed by George Soros and Woke “bail reform” efforts that have led to violent criminals being released without bond.  

Chicago, in particular, is under siege, having eclipsed 800 murders so far this year, some of them quite heinous.

·        A 70 year old retired special ed teacher slain on the way home from a White Sox game on the Dan Ryan Expressway.  The shooter was identified but never charged.

·        A 36 year old female graduate student was stabbed to death just blocks from Sears Tower on a Sunday morning.

·        Most recently, a 71 year old former restauranteur was executed in Chinatown.

·        A University of Chicago student was slain on the way home from his internship last summer and a recent graduate was murdered in the middle of the day for $600 worth of goods.

This is just a sampling of the horrific occurrences over the past year in Chicago, which has seen over 4,300 shootings, 1,600 carjackings, beatings, muggings and numerous other organized smash and grabs.  The spike in crime has devastated these cities.  Restaurants, retail establishments and tourism are taking a beating.   Large retailers like Target have gone to Congress asking for help.   Joe Perillo, owner of Gold Coast Exotic Motor Cars in Chicago, a one-time supporter of Lightfoot publicly lashed out, “Enough is enough.”

Ironically, during the same week as Jussie Smollett was convicted of staging a fake hate crime, Woom Sing Tse was randomly shot and killed in broad daylight.

In the midst of all this, I raise some important issues:

1.      Why was Darrell Brooks, the driver of the SUV that mowed down 60 people in Waukesha, not charged with a hate crime?  Why was Alphonso Joyner similarly not charged with a hate crime for the murder of Mr. Tse in Chicago? You can bet that if races were reversed, charges would be brought.  If we are to invoke hate crime statutes, shouldn’t they go both ways?

2.      Isn’t a fake hate crime actually worse than a hate crime?  A hate crime is directed at one or more individuals.  A fake hate crime, however, is directed at societal cohesion as a whole.  It is calculated to create racial animus where none exists.  Moreover, in the cases of Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett, those perpetrators had accomplices.   Politicians and the media were more than willing to make judgments before any of the facts were known.  In the case of the actual perpetrator, the correct punishment should be

3.      What do we do about “feral youth?”  This is perhaps the most difficult and vexing question our society must face with regard to criminal justice.  One of the teens involved in the robbery and murder of 18 year old Tessa Majors in NY was only 13 at the time and was sentenced to a mere 18 months in juvenile detention.  The teen girls that killed the Pakistani Uber Eats driver received an easy plea deal.  In Chicago,  young Adam (Li’l Homicide) Toledo was killed by a Chicago patrolman when he turned with a gun in his hand in a dark gangway in the middle of the night.  Carjackers are often 10-16 years old and I saw one film clip of a 5 year old kid that was part of a carjacking team.   What is to be done with these rogue youngsters.  In the case of youths that would be convicted of murder or attempted murder, as the girls that killed the Pakistani driver, I would be hard pressed to have hopes for a future for them, or that they could be rehabbed.  

4.      The explosion of crime in major cities simultaneously leads one to question whether this is simply a wrongheaded set of policies or whether something more nefarious is going on.   Is there intent to  purposefully force professional class and working class citizens (mostly white) people out of urban areas—deport them, if you will, or rather lead them to self-deport?  In Chicago, it seems to be backfiring, as professional class and working class blacks are exiting the city.

These are not easy issues to discuss but they must be faced head on if we are to save our great American cities.

Mythbusting

 I’m going to write a few things that will make some people uncomfortable.  So be it.  We’re well past the point of comfort now.  Most people understand that we are in a different place now, that many of our institutional safeguards have given way and many institutions such as the FBI and CDC, instituions that we expected to protect us and be nonpartisan about it, have become partisan tools.   To be sure, some of the erosion has been due to COVID, but much has been due to accepting as gospel myths that turned out to be false.  And I freely admit that to some extent and at one time or another, I bought into all of these. 

No longer.

We need to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. 

This pithy slogan of George W. Bush was used as the justification for invading Iraq and for the 20 year debacle in Afghanistan.  In the shadow of the horrors of 9/11, it seemed to make sense.  We all heard the last calls of the frightened people on flight 93 and those trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.  We all got behind W’s rationale for doing anything it took not to have that happen again.  But it turned out to be a false choice.  

We spent billions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, only to erode our standing in the world, exhaust our military, increase Iran’s influence in the Middle East and leave the Taliban with a nation state and advanced weapons. 

Al Qaeda and the Taliban and Iraq deserved an appropriate response but our policymakers chose the highest cost option—in blood and treasure.  And an overlooked cost to these misadventures is that we gave our future adversaries a free look at our doctrines, strategies, tactics and technologies.  And in the case of Afghanistan, we actually turned our weapons over to them.

If we have free and open commercial trade with China, a more prosperous middle class will bubble up, demand more freedom and the CCP will be forced to moderate, and China will become more like us.

A mere 4 years ago, I sat in the audience while Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama proclaimed this and a year later, I had lunch with libertarian economist Deirdre McCloskey, who voiced similar sentiments.  Enriching China may turn out to be the biggest policy mistake in history.  Our politicians blithely overlooked Tiananmen Square for three decades, pretended it didn’t happen and kept waiting for this sea change to occur.  What we got was exactly the opposite of what was predicted by the “experts” – an aggressive, bullying dictatorship that abrogated its deal on Hong Kong,  is threatening Taiwan, lying and covering up the COVID outbreak, threatening us with hypersonic missiles, and exercising hegemony in the South China Sea.  Our political, cultural and business leaders grovel before the CCP.  The NBA fears being shut out and disciplines people that criticize China.  Congressman Eric Swalwell openly cavorts with Chinese spy Fang Fang without serious repercussions, and the leader of America’s largest banking institution, Jamie Dimon obsequiously issued a public apology for offending the CCP.  Pope Francis had no reservations about openly criticizing Donald Trump is silent about China’s Uygher concentration camps and did a secret deal that purportedly gave the CCP veto power over appointments in China.  University of Chicago’s John Mersheimer has a must read article, The Inevitable Rivalry  in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs and I highly recommend it.  All this will be very difficult, if not impossible to reverse.  Since allowing China to join the WTO, I would argue that we have become more like China, rather than the other way around.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-10-19/inevitable-rivalry-cold-war

Mass incarceration is a problem.

Yes, we have been told that mass incarceration is a problem.  The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a lot of it is due to our draconian drug laws, which affect minorities disproportionately.  Because they are poorer and can’t afford bail, they are condemned to sitting in prison.   This has been drummed into us for a couple of decades.

Well, we loosened or eliminated drug laws, went to cashless bail, and, in cities like Chicago, dramatically raised the standards for prosecution.   We are seeing the results of all this with the flow of blood on city streets and the ravaging of a retail industry by looters—an industry that is already reeling because of Amazon and COVID.

As with China, it turns out that mass incarceration was the solution, not the problem.  And this doesn’t mean harsh prison sentences for minor drug offenses.  This means keeping dangerous felons away from productive members of society.    I tweeted this comment:

“Exploring the ‘root causes’ is a useless academic debate and focuses on the needs of the perpetrator sometime off in the future, if ever, rather than the innocent victims today.”

Meanwhile, population will just bleed off, literally and figuratively.”

Ironically, it is the black community in places like Chicago that are bearing most of the suffering due to the propagation of this myth.

Immigration is an unalloyed positive for the country.

Our country needs immigration and I am hardly anti-immigrant, having been reared in a largely immigrant community. Yet, a sane immigration policy would take into account the needs of the country.  There are only 3 squares an immigrant can land on upon arrival:

1.      Employed, self sufficient and productive.

2.      The social welfare system.

3.      The criminal justice system.

That’s it.  We want lots of people on square number one.   We have plenty in squares 2 and 3 already, thank you very much.  A sane policy would filter out as many individuals likely to occupy squares 2 and 3 as possible.

Other factors which make unfettered immigration undesirable is that the demand for unskilled labor is projected to decrease in the future.  We simply do not need lots of people with strong backs and nothing else to bring to the table as we did a century ago.   Yet another problem is that our school systems and other institutions have gone Woke, which means that rather than being fully integrated into our society, new immigrants, particularly those of color, are being told that they are oppressed.  This is not good for a cohesive society.

Sticking blindly to these myths have wreaked tremendous damage to our nation and both Republicans and Democrats share blame for peddling them, along with the so-called “experts.”  We need to make adjustments to them and make them sooner, rather than later.   It’s past time to change course.