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.