Detachment

 Ordinarily, I write a year end wrap-up with a list of “best ofs” in music, film, books, and so on.  This year, I’m going to do something a little different because the times demand it.  There were, I believe, a paucity of things to rave about as we emerged from our COVID cocoons.  Oh, in the literary world, I enjoyed Ian McKewan’s Lessons and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses and Top Gun: Maverick was quite inventive for such a long awaited sequel, but beyond that, I didn’t find much that was compelling.

Instead, I’m going to write my final essay of 2022 on what I found to be the theme of the year, and that is detachment.  It was during the year that I finally came to terms with the reality that my relationships with certain people and certain institutions have been severed.  The combination of COVID and Wokeness took their toll, as did the polarization of the Trump years (although I do not affix blame solely on Trump). 

One casualty was my relationship with The University of Chicago.  As someone with two degrees from that once august institution, I credit that place with developing my intellect in ways that probably could not have been done elsewhere.  And, as a former-student athlete, I formed many lifelong friendships there and I often returned to campus to renew my connection at homecoming and Reunion Weekend.  I count my time there as an undergraduate as the happiest of my life.

Yet I began to see things falter when one of the chief architects of the “Chicago Principles” of free speech, law school professor Geoffrey Stone caved to demands that he stop using the “n” word in his First Amendment class when the mob came after him. It seemed like a small concession at the time, but the mob always comes back for more.  You can’t give an inch to them.

Then, following the George Floyd riots, the English Department announced that in the coming academic year, it would only admit students into its graduate program that were interested in Black Studies.  Being “inclusive” absurdly meant a de facto exclusion of white students. 

The final straw came this autumn when the school proposed to offer a course entitled The Problem of Whiteness, triggering a backlash when a student called attention to it on social media.  Claiming she received death threats and a “flood of racist, misogynist, and homophobic” emails, Rebecca Journey took to media calling the student a cyberterrorist and otherwise smearing him and justifying her faux scholarship and racist course as an examination of the “problem of whiteness” from a “philosophical perspective.” 

What does that even mean?  And doesn’t this student also have a right to express his views?  There were no allegations that he violated the law or university policy.  Yet the university permitted a professor to defame a student.

With this incident, I finally came to the conclusion that I had to detach from the university completely.  I finally understood that while there were some holdouts like Japanese soldiers on remote islands that fought on long after the war had ended, my alma mater had largely been swallowed up in the wave of Wokeness and, reluctantly, it was time to say goodbye.

The second major detachment is from professional sports.  It’s hard to believe now but watching the Chicago Bears and NFL playoffs was a weekly ritual for me.  But since Colin Kaepernick began kneeling before the National Anthem, I stopped altogether and haven’t watched a game in three years. I simply lost all interest.  The antics of LeBron James and the NBA’s deference to the CCP caused the same distaste for the NBA and when major league baseball decided to jump into politics and move its all star game from Atlanta due to Georgia’s tightening of its voting laws (in addition to changing the name of the Cleveland Indians), I dropped baseball too.  Hockey was my last holdout but when the league recently announced that it was “too white” my affinity for that spectator sport flickered too.  I can’t say that I miss it much, actually.   And the benefit of detaching from pro sports is that I have shifted those hours into actually doing physical things rather than spectating. 

Perhaps the hardest part of this is detaching from certain people.  Jodi Shaw, who was canceled at Smith College, said that Wokeness in our culture necessarily means that your circles will shrink.  Some old friendships have disappeared, both by my choice and theirs.  I even lost a relative, who adhered to the Greta Thunberg theology of climate science.  When I stated my case based on facts and data, I received a nasty, vituperative email in return (from someone that claims to be a devout Christian, no less).  I lost my entire regular golf foursome to Trump Derangement Syndrome (even though I attempt to be even handed about Trump, seeing his positive traits and his deficiencies, I was considered a “Trumper”).  I lost one friend when he criticized my concerns about Biden for being “provocative” and said that he expected Biden to govern as a “moderate.”   I save the email in a separate folder but have not heard from him since, nor do I expect to.

Life moves on.  Perhaps I never appreciated how fragile and ephemeral some of these relationships were.  And I certainly underestimated the strength and pervasiveness of the Woke movement.  But 2022 for me was a Year of Detachment.  I finally admitted that these relationships could no longer be sustained.  As it occurs with a relative or friend that is a drug or alcohol addict, there is only one avenue open—detachment.  Just disconnect and don't look back.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Moore County

 Last weekend, a couple of electrical substations in Moore County, North Carolina were sabotaged in a coordinated firearms attack that plunged Pinehurst and Southern Pines into darkness for several days.  In the days leading up to the attack, residents had been protesting a drag queen event at the local theater.

The attack left thousands without power for days, induced a curfew and caused quite a stir, but I’m as interested in the response to the incident as the incident itself. 

Without a shred of evidence, Twitter was flooded with posts blaming the attack on the extreme right and painting the area as racist, homophobic, and redneck. 

“As a former Moore County resident, the extremism broiling in that small area is very Concerning.”

“The community knows why this happened.”

“F**k those terrorists and f**k everyone who has fueled anti-LGBTQ hate.”

Never mind that within days, there were attacks on substations in Oregon and Washington and documented “intrustions” into substations in Florida.  It’s as if these people learned nothing from the Jussie Smollett and Bubba Wallace “nooses” or “hands up don’t shoot.”  They so desperately want the narrative to be true, they don’t wait for facts to come in.  Or they invent facts.  The whole incident overlooks the fact that people in a community have every right to protest a drag show and complain about the event on the main commercial strip in their town.

In the same week, we learned that there is a warrant out for the arrest of Sam Brinton, the freaky, flamboyant LGBTQ undersecretary of energy tin charge of nuclear waste disposal and also attests to the fact that his non-binary partner and he are “animal play enthusiasts.”  Call me an extremist, but I prefer to have the person in charge of the disposal of nuclear materials to be a deadly serious person with no badges of mental health issues or propensity to engage in criminal behavior.   Brinton evidently has a habit of swiping other peoples’ luggage from airport carousels along with jewels.

So far, the Biden administration has resisted demands for his firing.

In Chicago, Project Veritas caught a dean at Chicago’s highbrow Francis Parker High School boasting about how much he enjoyed passing around sex toys in their sex ed class and explaining how they worked during Pride Week, igniting a firestorm on Twitter and featured on Sean Hannity.  As in the Moore County incident, it was the response of the school that was most disturbing.  Instead of relieving this gent of his duties, the president of the school went on the attack, claiming that “far right”  Project Veritas “misrepresented” the conversation and edited the tape.   Apparently, if you use the word “inclusive” in your response, it grants a license to engage in any kind of depravity with minors.

To finish the week, the Biden administration swapped notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout with America hating WNBA star Britney Griner.  I did not revel in her harsh penalty despite her flouting her contempt for this country.  But the swap echoed of the Bowie Bergdahl trade in which Obama swapped 5 Taliban killers for traitor Bergdahl.   The Taliban immediately put these guys back into circulation.  Worse, NBC reported that the administration could have had the release of Marine Paul Whelan instead.  Griner’s release will undoubtedly cost lives as Bout will be back in business shortly.

These incidents are not independent events and  demonstrate a real and troubling pattern.  Under the guise of LGBT rights, and  “tolerance” institutions are advancing an agenda that has insidious aspects to it.  First, it grants a hall pass with alphabet sexuality.   That Brinton hasn’t been fired for criminal activity is appalling.   In the case of the dean at Francis Parker, the school backed his highly inappropriate course and instead railed against objecting parents and Project Veritas.    Second, as we’ve seen in the Francis Parker incident and many others,  the movement uses the pretext of sex ed to start to normalize pedophilia.   Schools are making sexually charged materials available to minors, not to mention pushing transgenderism.  Third, even where there is no connection as in the attack on the substations in North Carolina, the movement is quick to demonize objectors as “haters” and anti-LGBT bigots.   If you object to explicit sexual materials in middle school libraries, the screech “book banner!” They have learned from the BLM movement that it works.  In the Griner case, it has demonstrated that the life of Griner (who is gay) trumps the lives of others that will almost certainly die as a consequence of the release of Viktor Bout.  We just don’t know who they are or how many there will be yet.

There are some very insidious aspects to this movement and conservatives must be steadfast in their opposition to them.   Their weapons are formidable. The goal is to divide the community over these issues, and so far they are winning.

 

That Smell

 Something smelled bad from the beginning.  It was like the slight whiff that you pick up when your stove burner accidentally gets turned on and the pilot light hasn’t ignited the burner yet.   At first, you barely notice it, but gradually, the odor gets stronger and stronger until it becomes unmistakable and  you rush to the kitchen to turn off the stove before your kitchen blows up.

Vlodomor Zelenskyy emitted that odor pretty early on, but few picked it up.  

The first signs were the gushing press.  Not since Barack Obama had the media been so effusive in its praise, swooning over this two bit comedic actor cum courageous leader.  “Churchillian" was the word most frequently used to describe him.   Photos of him in his green shirt and combat helmet among his fighters were plastered all over the media.  It was all so believable.   The brave young inspirational warrior fighting back against the unprovoked attack from the dark and sinister ex-KGB totalitarian Vladimir Putin.     

But then things began to take a slight turn.  Rather than make a plea for help, Zelenskyy started making demands on the West.   Even conservative commentators found that a bit odd.  Then, like Dr. Fauci, the MSM began glamorize him and feature him on the cover of magazines, reaching unseemly levels with the Vogue photoshoot with his wife last summer.  All the while, the U.S. was shoveling billions into the war torn country. Certainly, we all have sympathy for the people of Ukraine, desire to see an end to the fighting and roll back Putin’s aggression.  But when Rand Paul had the temerity to even suggest that we ask for an accounting of where the money was being spent, he was shouted down by Democrats as a “Putin lover” and an “obstructionist.”

Zelenskyy started to take on the appearance of that ungrateful pro bono litigation client.  Pro bono litigants have NO incentive to make any concessions while someone else is paying the freight.

Most revealing of late was Zelenskyy’s demand that the West take action immediately after missiles fell in Poland, killing two people and injuring several others.   Without confirming with his own military, Zelenkyy recklessly attempted to bait the Western alliance into a hot war with Russia.   The missiles turned out not to be an attack on Polish soil by Russia but rather an anti-aircraft missile from Ukraine itself.  Those are the things you need to get right.

Grift is easy to bury within a moral imperative.  And what better moral imperative than to turn back the kleptomanic Vladimir Putin.  Yet, Zelenskyy shut down the opposition party.

Closely linked to the unending and unaccountable flow of funds to the corrupt Ukraine has been the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.  Founder Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) learned from Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff and scaled it.   The facts are still unfolding but we do know that Ukraine placed some funds with FTX.  SBF was the second largest Democratic donor behind George Soros.  SBF’s parents were vocal leftists at the Stanford law school and SBF’s father had a close relationship with SEC chairman Gary Gensler.  SBF’s parents along with other FTX executives bought property in the Bahamas worth $121 million.  Caroline Ellison, SBF’s 28 year old ex-girlfriend, ran FTX’s trading arm, Alameda.  While we are unraveling the threads of this debacle, we know that SBF cloaked himself in virtue signaling—ESG, anti-racism, the whole lot.  He asserted that he only wanted to make money in order to give it away to pet progressive causes.   It gave him the smokescreen needed to enrich himself and his family and launder money back to the Democratic party which was providing air cover for him, rather than investigating his financial shenanigans.

Finally, there was BLM, which was showered with millions in the wake of the death of George Floyd (notice, I did not say murder).   Corporate America and wealthy individuals skipped over normal due diligence that is standard in the giving world to demonstrate their solidarity with the BLM movement.  Large corporate donations always have strings and a specific purpose attached.  Not this time.  The result was predictable.  Not a single project that attempted to better actual Black lives materialized.  Not a scholarship fund.  Not a health care center.  No endowments to HBCUs.  What did happen, just as with SBF, is that the leaders of BLM became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.  To date, Patricia Cullors has not been indicted, or even seriously investigated for perpetrating this fraud.

The radical Left, camouflaged in virtue, has gotten very skilled at washing money, using tax dollars and charitable contributions to buy influence, fund its candidates, and enrich its leaders.

Rand Paul is one of the only ones that understands the scale of this.

The Problem With Whiteness

 Every time I see an article or a posting from the mainstream media now, my default reaction is “how am I being manipulated?” rather than “how am I being informed.”

So it was yesterday when I saw the lead article in the Chicago Sun Times about Rebecca Journey, the instructor at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, who postponed her class, The Problem of Whiteness after an outcry purportedly instigated by sophomore Daniel Schmidt, a student that brought this course to light in social media.

The Chicago Sun Times dutifully picked up the story and, without any critical analysis or questioning, posted it.   As is the case in most articles, a piece that should have been relegated to the opinion pages was out there on the front page, masquerading as news.  The tone and slant of the piece could have (and perhaps was) penned by Ms. Journey herself.

The response by Journey is a boringly predictable one from the neo-Marxist, operating under the camouflage of “scholarship.”

The first tactic of Leftists is exaggeration or outright prevarication.  Journey claims, without support, that she was subject to death threats, cyberbullying and that her inbox was flooded with “racist, misogynistic and antisemitic attacks and threats.”  No specifics, just the labels here.  I’m actually surprised she didn’t find a noose dangling from her office door handle.   It’s possible but it’s more likely she received a few  emails objecting to her nonsense and inflated them. Committed Leftists now have a track record of exaggerating, or flat out lying.  Just ask Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace or AOC about her whereabouts on 1/6.   I highly doubt that the Sun Times reporter asked to see the “flood” of emails, and simply took her word for it.

The second is obfuscation in academic jargon.   “The class is emphatically not about ‘the problem with white people’” Journey disingenuously claims, the class approaches whiteness as a problem in the philosophical sense of an open question—whiteness as an object of critical inquiry.”  Oh, ok, then.  Bury the intent in academic mumbo-jumbo.  In other words, you plebes are too dumb to understand.  Well, I have a simple test of symmetry.  Applying the Iron Law of Reciprocity, can we assume that Ms. Journey will be offering the companion course in the following academic quarter, “The Problem with Blackness?”  Because if not, her rationalization fails.  More bluntly, it smacks of unadulterated BS.

Most predictably, Journey then predictably positioned herself as the poor victim, “This was a malicious attack not just on me as a teacher, but on anti-racist pedagogy writ large.”   She attacks a sophomore in college for having a viewpoint and exposing her faux scholarship.  Oh, poor me.  Oh, the drama.  The 19 year kid is not only a threat to her but to a whole body of scholarship, a grave enough threat that Journey feels compelled to go to the press to express her fears.   Playing victim is a standard leftist tactic.  Here, the professor is attempting to portray herself as being victimized by a student.

Journey is an activist pretending to be a scholar.  She met with resistance to her attempted use of a once great university as her platform to preach Wokeness doctrine.  She may deceive some with her  artifice, but those of us that have spent any time at all listening to thinkers like James Lindsay or Jordan Peterson know EXACTLY what she is doing.

It has been very sad to see The University of Chicago succumb to Woke madness so quickly.  From the English Department’s decision to only accept students in its graduate program that  want to pursue Black studies to the establishment of an entire department devoted to Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, Woke had gotten into its bones like leukemia. 

What Went Wrong

 The Red Wave that was eagerly awaited by us conservatives and libertarians after suffering through two years of the most radically socialist regime in American history fizzled out quickly and turned out to be red drizzle.  And as of this writing, as more ballots are found, trucked in and counted and recounted, it looks like Republicans will not take the Senate and may not even have a majority in the House.   Like most, I fell victim to unrealistic expectations.   The stage was set for a Democratic thrashing.  Gas prices were astronomical as were food prices as inflation raged.  The economy was contracting.  Our foreign policy was in disarray.   Violent crime was rampant in most American cities.  People were angry.  I felt sure that there would be a massive course correction.

It never materialized.

The talking heads are busy doing their most mortem analysis.  I’ll throw in my two cents but in the final analysis, the reason is quite simple--- there is a fundamental asymmetry at play and unless it gets cured fairly quickly and decisively, America will soon become Venezuela North.   When one side is committed to a vibrant, competitive two party system where candidates fully and and openly fully inform citizens of their positions, and the other side is ruthless, unprincipled and comfortable with deception, you know who will prevail in the end.

But I must do some finger pointing.   While the Democratic party is united in its lust for power (even saying the exact same lines in the weeks before the election, “Democracy is on the ballot this November.”), the Republican party is hopelessly divided. Mitch McConnell dissed several candidates and withheld funds from many while spooning out funds to demi-Democrats like Lisa Murkowski.  Trump damaged the cause by slamming DiSantis three days before the election and both DiSantis and Youngkin immediately after.  Even people that were generally supportive of Trump pounded our heads against the wall on this one.  At some point I knew his costs would outweigh his benefits and we seem to have crossed that line.  DiSantis and Youngkin ironically are the two candidates that explicitly took on Woke ideology head on.  And to say DiSantis was an “average” governor is simply not true.  He may be the most competent on the American stage right now.   I support leaders that put the country ahead of their own narrow interests.  Trump just demonstrated that he can’t put it above is own ego.

Then there is the phenomenon of Illinois, New York, and Michigan.   These three states carried out the most punishing, restrictive and civil liberties crushing COVID policies in the country.   Masking kids, closing schools, requiring vaxx passes, firing unvaccinated workers.  Governor Pritzker canceled the entire 2020 high school football season while no other contiguous state did.  Whitmer chased 70ish barber around for not complying with lockdown.   I assumed that enough anger would rise up to throw these people out of office.  But alas, each was rewarded with another term.  It is beyond comprehension.   Perhaps voters in these states are like abused spouses.  No matter how many beatings they incur, they inexplicably always go back.  And perhaps the net outflow of citizens has been enough to tip the elections.  People that would otherwise have voted against them have already left.

Several years ago, I heard outgoing Democratic leader Dick Gephardt speak at a function.  While I was no big fan of Gephardt in office, he said one thing that stuck with me, “In America, our democracy functions because losers accept the outcome.”   That is no longer the case.  The nonsense that the MAGA wing of the Republican party are election deniers ignores the blatant shenanigans that have been going on, were accelerated by COVID and mail-in ballots and have been perfected by Democrats.   If what is going on now in Arizona had been going on in any Latin American country 10,20, or 30 years ago, American leaders would be screaming for international monitors.   It began with the election of Al Franken in Minnesota, got tested with the election of Brad Schneider in the contested 10^th district in Illinois, where Schneider improbably got 85% of the absentee vote in 2012, just enough to put him over the top.  It is on full display now with ballot harvesting, mail in voting and changing rules to ensure that fraud is nearly undetectable.  The Democratic response was, “There is no evidence of massive fraud!!!”  Well, you don’t really need massive fraud.  You just need a little, coordinated fraud in the right places in close elections.   And there is enough monkey business to shatter faith in the system.

The cheating comes in several forms.  The ballot harvesting and drop boxes are bad enough.  But when Big Tech and the media are controlling information and actively preventing citizens from obtaining relevant information (i.e., hiding Hunter’s laptop and Fetterman’s condition), the system breaks down.  And now we see several avenues of money laundering to Democratic causes—from BLM to FTX (not to mention the Soros DA’s that are breaking down our cities), to 10% for the Big Guy,  the flow of funds is drowning our republic.

To be sure,  there were some small victories.  Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, creations of the media, have been taken off the game board.   Democrats spent a lot of money trying to get these two elected.  But Abrams served her purpose.  By constantly howling about the fiction of voter suppression, she helped institutionalize mail in voting and ballot harvesting, thus cementing the mechanisms by which Democrats will steer election outcomes for the foreseeable future.  She has been rewarded handsomely for it, going from deeply in debt to having a sizeable net worth in just a few years.

What I fear is really going on is national mitosis.  Mitosis, as you science geeks know, is the process by which a cell divides into two.  It doesn’t happen abruptly but is, in fact, a process.  It’s occurring with outmigration from New York, Illinois and California.  People who can are moving at an accelerating pace away from single party rule and the attendant crime, taxes and corruption.   If it were simply geographic, we’d probably be split by now.  Even Victor Davis Hanson admitted in his last podcast, “We are two nations now.”   Once enough of the population moves, then the optimal solution may be to negotiate a split as Czechoslovakia did under Vaclav Havel.   We do not need a destructive second civil war.

Hold Your Powder

 I learned by lesson in 2019, or at least I think I did.  I saw the headlines and the photos propagated by the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets depicting a smug teenager in a MAGA hat, seemingly harassing an old Native American man, who the mainstream media also said was a veteran that had done a tour in Vietnam.

The outrage on Facebook boiled up, some among friends of mine.  I also felt this surge of indignity about this punk.  Many celebrities weighed in, including Joe Biden, calling young Nicholas Sandmann  a white supremacist, and on and on.   Fortunately, I refrained from making any comment the matter on social media.

In the days that followed, as other recorded film clips became public, the truth began to emerge.  What had occurred was precisely the OPPOSITE of what the media had portrayed.  The Native American was an activist, a grifter, found out not to have seen combat in Vietnam, and he was the one that was in Sandmann’s face, harassing him.

Then there was the NASCAR noose, found by Bubba Wallace that triggered the dispatch of 15 FBI agents to investigate a purported hate crime.  The incident went viral in the MSM and social media, only to have the FBI determine that the “noose” was a garage pull.

But in the hysteria, Nikki Haley couldn’t help herself.  Before any of the facts could be determined, she tweeted out how much she deplored it, and racism in general, blah, blah, blah.  Her lurching impulsiveness and virtue mongering, among other things, has crossed her off my list for any serious national post.

Of course, there was Jussie Smollett.  “This is MAGA country” on a cold Chicago night was so implausible so as to be laughable.  Within hours, almost every thinking person smoked out the hoax.  That incident caused me to conclude that fake hate crimes were worse than real hate crimes, because while hate crimes target an individual, fake hate crimes tear at the fabric of society. 

We also had the incident at the border in which the media claimed that a border agent was taking a whip to border crossers.  That was demonstrably false, the photographer said it was false, Tyler Mayoras knew it was false.  Yet they perpetrated it anyway.

There have been a plethora of fake hate incidents, the most recent being the assertion of a young woman on the Duke volleyball team that someone had used a racial slur to taunt her.  There was no corroboration and no video of the purported incidents.  Like “hands up don’t shoot,” and the Bubba Wallace “noose,” many of these incidents simply didn’t happen. 

Which brings us to Paul Pelosi, who was purportedly attacked by an intruder and injured with a hammer this weekend while Nancy was away.  As of this writing, there appear to be a number of facts that just aren’t adding up,  The strange police call, “His name is David and he is a friend.” There are reports that a third person met the police at the door.  Yet we have no details about who this person was.  And the broken glass from the glass door was seen to be outside, not inside, leading one to believe that the glass was broken from the inside.  Police won’t release the bodycam video.  The details don’t add up and they keep changing.

Yet Hillary Clinton, Rob Reiner, Laurence Tribe, Reuters, among others immediately attributed the incident to “far right wing extremists, “ either directly or indirectly, without a full accounting of the facts.   Incredible.  We really don’t know what happened, and may never.

The lesson in all this is ----hold your powder when a news story breaks.  Do not accept narrative that  the media and the authorities.  It is especially  important  when the event either involves charges of racism a hate crime,  “far right extremism.”  Always be a little skeptical.  The truth is hard to come by these days.  But eventually it does come out.

 

 

Detachment

 If you’re like me, your world has been turned upside down over the past three years.  Institutions that you thought you could count on have gone rogue.  People that you counted on as friends abandoned you if you questioned the wisdom of the jab or masking.  If you did not genuflect to the image of Ibram X. Kendi, you were branded a racist.  Of course, if you showed any support for Trump at all, you were a fascist. If you questioned child pornography in middle school libraries, you were labeled a book banner.   If you dared raise questions about the 2020 election process, you were a conspiracy theorist and a threat to democracy.

It was as if someone had, in the middle of a chess game, kicked over the board and scattered all the pieces.

What is a rational person to do?

Having struggled with some of these things myself, I can offer a few tips, as to what to do with people and institutions as Woke madness grips the West.  

The answer, I think,  lies in detachment.  I have found that viewing Wokeness through the model of addiction is the most useful for managing relationships in this era.   Al-Anon and Hazelton teach detachment from the addicted person.  

Detachment is neither kind nor unkind.  It does not imply judgment of the person or situation from which we are detaching- it is simply a way we can protect ourselves.  By separating ourselves from the adverse effects of another’s personal addiction(s) [or Wokeness], it can be a means of detaching; this does not mean that we need to physically separate.  Detachment can help us look at our situations realistically and objectively.  

Viewing a person or institution gripped by Wokeness through the prism and model of addiction is the most useful way of managing your relationships.

First, is the easy part—institutions that go Woke.

 And so many went fully Woke.  And they went fast.  I was a charter member of the American Writers Museum when it opened in 2017 and started with programs featuring Ernest Hemmingway, Laura Ingalls Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But within 3 years, it was featuring Kathy Griffin and an obscure transgender writer. I immediately dropped my membership, just as I dropped the Newberry Library as soon as it sponsored Drag Queen Story Hour for kids.

Those were the easy ones.  The University of Chicago was harder because I had such deep ties to the institution and because it had such an impact on my development and was part of my identity.  But when the school decided to admit into its graduate English program only students that were interested in “Black Studies,” and the business school sponsored a program on White Privilege, it was time to say goodbye.    Because some of my oldest friendships center on the University of Chicago, the trick has been to detach from the institution without detaching from my old friends.  I have asked to be removed from their email list and the alumni magazine.  Yet I will attend events where my friends are present.   So far, I have achieved a balance.

In general, detaching from institutions does not present too many difficulties.   You drop your memberships and donations and stop attending events or fundraisers and swap out.  I have substituted other non-Woke organization (Library of America, for instance) to become affiliated with. 

People are much harder—especially when they are closer to you.  As Jodie Shaw (formerly of Smith College) noted – your circles will contract considerably.  And she was correct.  Mine have.

Some, I had to simply let go of.  My great uncle sent me a blistering, nasty email when I civilly challenged his liberal orthodoxy on climate change.  I left my regular weekly golf foursome when they contracted a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and could talk about nothing else for four hours at a crack.  Likewise, I disconnected from professional contacts that inappropriately used professional platforms like LinkedIn to spew their TDS or worship of Kamala Harris or registered their bellyaching over the Dobbs decision.   I either mute or delete contacts that put pronouns in their bios.  I figure if I don’t know you well enough to know what you are, it’s going to be hard to do business together.  I call it de-networking.  

The hard part involves the Woke that are either family members or with whom you have long term, valued relationships. I have had some success by having frank discussions with them about steering clear of topics involving politics.  I just tell them it’s something I would prefer not to discuss, that there are other things I’d rather talk about.  Usually, they will respect that position.

Coming to grips with the realization that a Woke individual or an institution captured by Wokeness is similar to having an alcoholic or drug addicted friend or relative.  Your best bet is detachment.  It’s hard, especially if these were people that were close to you. It’s disorienting.  But when reason, data and logic are ineffective, you have little other choice.  Arguing with the Woke is a complete and utter exercise in futility.  You will not persuade them, and the longer you exchange with them, the more you look foolish for even bothering to engage.  It will not be an intellectually honest exchange of views.  It is usually easy to figure it out pretty quickly because they inevitably resort to labeling early on.   You are called a “fascist,” “racist,” “bigot,” “Trumper” or such other slander.  On social media and in person, I have a simple rule—once someone engages in that, the conversation stops.

I continue to adjust to this new game, but I’m learning and I hope these suggestions will be helpful to you.

Detachment is never easy, but if you learn how to do it, it will help your own mental well being.

 

 

Quick Hits

 

I haven't had much time to post lately, but I wanted to at least jot down a few brief thoughts, so here are some questions and observations.

I have a few questions and observations.

-Five months after the leak of the Dobbs opinion, we still have no information on the leaker.  The MSM has long since dropped following it faster than they dropped the Las Vegas shooter or the Nashville Christmas bombing.  Why haven’t we heard from Chief Justice Roberts on the matter?

-Led by Iranian women, the country is experiencing the most serious rebellion against the mullahs since the Green Revolution.   After the death of Mahsa Amini (like the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in  at the hands of the “morality police,” Iran has exploded once again with young women protesting, burning their hijabs, cutting their hair.  Yet the MSM is almost totally silent.

-I predict that the next 18-24 months will witness a liberal/conservative convergence.  Tulsi Gabbard leaving the Democratic party was consequential.  It has already begun, mostly with Jewish progressives that have been canceled.  Maud Maron, Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein, among other sensible progressives are leading the way in rejecting much of the Woke agenda.  I see much more of this coming.

-The biggest false phrases--- systemic racism, gender affirmation, voter suppression, toxic masculinity.  They describe nothing and are fraudulent labels placed on things that simply do not exist.  They are cute, clever and deceptive.  They describe nothing.

-BLM leader Patrisse Cullors absconded with millions of “donations” for her own enrichment.  No one can name a single scholarship or professor at an HBCU endowed by BLM, or any meaningful project whatsoever that actually improved black lives.  Why hasn’t a single attorney general gone after her? 

-We have lost the capability of learning from our mistakes.  In Iraq, we learned to our chagrin what happens when you leave a security gap.  Others quickly fill the void.  In Iraq’s case, ISIS occupied the space that a security force occupied.  Not content to blunder in someone else’s society, we decided to repeat the folly in our large cities by defunding the police.  What we got was warlords.   The lesson is that when you defund the police, you don’t get no police; you get different police.  And you won’t like them.

-At one time, I held college professors in higher esteem than I did farmers and truck drivers.  What a terrible mistake in judgment about who contributes more to society.

That’s all, folks.

 

Cruelty

 I should know better.  As someone who has read fairly extensively about the Third Reich and the Holocaust and who has frequently attended events at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, as well as having read a fair amount on Mao’s China and Stalin’s gulags and starvation of Ukraine, I should know what cruelty humans are capable of perpetrating.

Still, the cold indifference to human life is disquieting, even more so since it has become manifest here.

Iran.

The murder of young Mahsa Amini by the “morality police” of Iran has sparked widespread protests in Iran.  They are reminiscent of the Green Revolution of 2009, toward which the Obama administration was largely tight lipped.  The brutal killing of Amini echoes of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, then 26 by Iranian security forces.  This time, the uprising seems more widespread and threatening to the mullahs.  Oddly, the American left feminists are strangely silent as courageous Iranian women take to the streets, burning their hijabs, cutting their hair and demanding freedom.   American congresswoman Ilan Omar, who has an opinion about all things oppressive, is pretty mum on the struggle of her Islamic sisters in Iran.

Russia

Whatever your views on Russia and Zelenskyy, the snuffing out of so many innocent lives in Ukraine by Putin is disquieting, particularly when Russia threatens the world with nuclear weapons.  There are no good guys in this picture.  Zelenskyy is like the pro bona litigation client that is ok with spending bottomless legal fees and unwilling to settle.  Putin, on the other hand, has utter disregard for human life. 

China

The situation with the Uyghers is abhorrent.  Its takeover of Hong Kong was despicable.  Its cover up and handling of COVID19 was horrendous.  It continues to let fentanyl pour in to the U.S. and kill 100,000 people a year.  Yet, big business, academia and entertainment are still deferential to the CCP, even as it threatens Taiwan. 

U.S.A.

Once the bastion and enforcer of human rights, the U.S., human rights now takes a back seat to Wokeness.  Its Democratic city mayors are satisfied with the killing and murders of thousands of innocent cities so they can advance their notion of social justice.  The leftist mayors and governors were happy to permanently arrest the development of children under the guise of COVID policies in schools.  When the Dobbs decision was rendered, blue state politicians went apoplectic.  In Illinois, governor Pritzker initiated a program of mobile abortion units, echoing the Nazi mobile extermination units.

Worse, by permitting the crime surge in U.S. cities, government officials are implicitly subordinating the lives of innocent citizens to the interests of violent criminals. 

It’s hard not to get depressed when faced with all this.  I always thought that the U.S. would never advance political and ideological interests ahead of the lives of this citizens.

This is no longer the case. The cold indifference to human life has come home.

1972

 It’s rare that we get to revisit our boyhoods but 1972 by Scott Morrison allowed me to do just that.  Rolling back the clock by 50 years, 1972 recounts the Cold War matchup between Team Canada (really, Team NHL) and the Soviet Union.  Billed as an exhibition series, the event evolved into a battle between the West and the Soviets, played out on a sheet of ice.

1972 was a year of intense competition between East and West.  Three years earlier, the U.S. had overcome an initial deficit in the space race to put a man on the moon ahead of the Soviets.  Earlier that summer, the brash, idiosyncratic Bobby Fisher overcame an in initial two game deficit to best Boris Spassky and dethrone the Soviets in their national pastime—chess.

The series was initially promoted as merely an exhibition series and the promoters had a difficult time at first selling the idea to the N.H.L. players.  1972 was pre-big contracts and many N.H.L. players had off season jobs or ran hockey camps to support their families.  After a bit of haggling, the organizers agreed to pay the players a small cut of the gate, which amounted to only $2-3,000 per player.  In addition, the competing W.H.A. was just getting off the ground and the fledgling league had just signed Bobby Hull to a million dollar contract.   The organizers decided that they would limit players to N.H.L. players, which meant that one of the league’s most prolific goal scorers would be left off.  The other sidelined star was Bobby Orr, who was nursing a knee injury.  Team Canada would be without the two superstar Bobby’s.

Nonetheless, Team Canada was stacked with talent.  At the time, the N.H.L. was a 14 team league. Led by Phil Esposito,  the All-Star team had Yvan Cournoyer, Brad Park, Jean Ratelle, Vic Hadfield, the brothers Pete and Frank Mahovlich, Gary Berman, Dennis Hull, and Gary Bergman  with Hall of Famers Ken Dryden and Tony Esposito in the nets.

The arrogant, yet out of condition Canadiens expected to make short work of the Soviets, who had played together and were in peak condition.

Imagine the shock when the Soviets smoked Team Canada in game 1, 7-3.  The Canadiens won game 2, 4-1 and game 3 ended in a tie, but the Soviets won game 4 and had a 2-1 lead when the series went back to Moscow.  The Canadian fans booed their heroes, causing de facto captain Phil Esposito to give an emotional speech expressing his disappointment in the fans.

Things looked very bleak after the Soviets won game 5 in Moscow to take a commanding 3-1 lead in the series.  With their backs against the wall (just as Bobby Fischer was against Boris Spassky a few weeks earlier), Team Canada began to gel and rallied to win games 6 and 7, for a decisive game 8.

In game 8, Team Canada again had to fight to come from behind as the Soviets took the lead 4 times in the game.  Going into the third period, the Soviets had a two goal lead, 5-3 and the Soviets had informed the Canadiens that if the game was tied that the tiebreaker rules said that the Soviets would win on points (right?).  The tenacious play of Phil Esposito enabled Team Canada to come back and tie the game with less than 10 minutes left with a goal by Yvan Cournoyer.   Tensions boiled over when the goal light failed to go on and a brawl nearly ensued with organizer Alan Eagleson having to be escorted out of the rink.  Recall that just weeks earlier the Olympic officials had made some suspiciously bad calls in the finals between the Soviets and the U.S.  With less than a minute to play, the game looked like it would end up in a tie.  But there was a scramble around the Soviet goal.  Announcer Foster Hewitt made the memorable call:

Henderson made a wild stab for it and fell.  Here’s another shot…right in front.  They score!  HENDERSON HAS SCORED FOR CANADA!

All of Canada went wild.  Just as Bobby Fischer had crawled back from a deficit against Boris Spassky, Team Canada had salvaged its national pride in its native game.

Much has changed in those 50 years.  The game has changed.  The series opened up the league to European players, and later, Russian and Eastern Bloc players.  The  economics of the league have changed.  No player needs to work side jobs to get by.  Some of the changes have undoubtedly been for the better.  Rules changes have made the play faster.   Players are more skilled.   Fights and violence have diminished.  Fighting and violence marred the Summit Series and there is still controversy over Bobby Clarke’s intentional slash of Soviet star player Valerie Kharlamov that broke his ankle. 

Still, the league was smaller.  Teams played each other more frequently, so one could identify more easily with teams and players.  The N.H.L. had 14 teams at the time and now has 32.  

And it is with a bit of sadness that many of the players are gone now.   Tony Esposito.  Pat Stapleton.  Stan Mikita.  Bill White.  Gary Bergman.  Rod Gilbert.  J.P. Parise.  Bill Goldsworthy.

And 50 years later, there is still a lot of anxiety about a nuclear confrontation with Russian.

Some things never change.

Pushback

 Pushback

In these dark times, I am trying to cling to events that give us a bit of hope.  With inflation raging, the stock market imploding, the border overrun, it’s hard to find things that give one a bit of succor.  We are, in fact, living through as time as disquieting as it has been since WWII, and it is not overreacting to have genuine concerns over whether our republic will come out whole.  But it is important to keep in mind that tyrants always enjoy first mover advantage.  Freedom loving people are a bit slow to react and gather themselves, and as it did in the 1940’s, we are seeing signs of pushback against the forces of tyranny.

Immigration
In an absolutely brilliant move, the governors of Texas and Florida began to send the illegal immigrants that are pouring over the border to sanctuary cities and, in the case of Florida governor DeSantis, to the elite liberal bastion of Martha’s Vineyard.  Mayors of “sanctuary cities” like New York, DC, and Chicago griped that they “just didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with them.”  In the case of Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, she promptly shipped them off to neighboring suburbs.  The good souls of Martha’s Vineyard, having been “enriched” by their visitors, called in the national guard and shoved them off to a military base within two days.  Nevertheless, the point had been made.  The false sanctimony of the progressives was put on display for all to see.

Trans movement
Independent journalist Matt Walsh exposed the Vanderbilt Medical Center for its hideous “gender affirmation” clinic, which disfigures preteen kids.  His expose of these modern Mengeles has triggered Tennessee lawmakers to take up a measure to bar these clinics from surgically altering minors and preventing them from administering puberty blockers.  Megyn Kelly has likewise featured interviews with individuals that regret their earlier decisions to undergo gender transition.   Abigail Shrier wrote her groundbreaking book “Irreversible Damage” (pulled from the shelves at Target) decrying the awful practice of influencing preteen girls into changing their gender.  After a late start, forces are beginning to emerge to oppose this cult-like trend.

Sweden and Italy
The Woke movement and the World Economic Forum are beginning to run into stiff political resistance.  Great Britain opted out of the EU entirely.  Hungary and Poland have been defying EU prescriptions on a number of fronts, including unimpeded Islamic immigration from the Middle East.  Sweden elected a conservative government and Italy has now followed suit.  The Swedish and Italian elections represent a rejection of the unelected authority of the EU and of the injection of Islamism into European culture.  The election of Georgia Melani is particularly satisfying, since she is a thumb in the eye of the EU and the WEF.  The leftist media is already labelling a “fascist,” a “racist” and the farthest right leader of Italy since Mussolini.  In fact, she is a civilizationist.

Safe-T Act
The Safe-T Act is the cashless bail act that was passed in the middle of the night, that, among other things, limits detainable offenses, provides that police cannot remove trespassers on you business or personal property and prohibits police from tracking down scofflaws for 48 hours after they remove electronic monitoring.  At a time when Chicago is reeling under an unprecedented crime wave, the Safe-T Act is an entirely pro-criminal statute.

The outrageousness of it compelled me to do something I have never done before—called my legislator to voice my displeasure.  She mostly spit back her standard talking points.  I went overboard to be polite and restrained—probably too much so.  When she started railing on the opposition for putting out “lies,” I politely reigned her back in and said, “I am interested in hearing why you supported it and the facts and data you looked at.” She deflected by saying “all cities are having a surge in crime.” She showed no concern whatsoever for victims of crime.   On the positive side, though, I did spend 30-40 minutes with her on the phone, she said they were working on “clarifications” to the statute, so she must be taking some heat for this.  I did my small part to push back, and I will do more.

 As I have often said, “Tyrants have first mover advantage.”  But we are seeing signs that resistance is gathering and it has to be a grass roots project

A Little Hope

 I will be converting my blog to substack shortly under the name Darkly Optimistic.  Over the past couple of years, my blog posts have been more darkly than optimistic, a sad reflection of the trough that we are in.

So I thought I’d spread just a little bit of optimism in my post this week.

I spent two week in Pinehurst, North Carolina and tried to limit my visits to social media, as working in downtown Chicago and living in a nearby suburb under Governor Pritzker can be quite taxing on the old mental health.   Even a short stay in a small town and periodic breaks from social media can have a salutary effect on a person.

While there seems to be a deluge of bad news for the last couple of years, even including talk of civil war and a national divorce, I did make a few observations while I was away from a large urban center that gave me some hope for the future, and I came away with one overriding thought:

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Here were my experiences:

I drove around North Carolina for two full weeks and not a single driver cut me off or gave me the middle finger.  This is a daily occurrence in Chicago.

Not a single homeless person rattled a cup in my face.  Not a single one was huddled in a doorway.   In Chicago, you can’t walk 3 blocks downtown without confronting one. 

Most interesting was attendance at church.   I was surprised by the attendance at late Sunday morning Mass.  The local parish church is fairly large and it was fairly full.   I also noted that there were a number of entire families, many of whom had 3 or 4 small children.  And nearly everyone was dressed up.  Very few people had on jeans or shorts.  Most women wore dresses.  Men had collared shirts.  Little boys had their hair combed with Brylcreem.   Three women wore veils.   For the first time in a long time, the phrase “your Sunday best” meant something.

The next day brought some beach time.  Again, there were many families with small children.  I was struck by the fathers, attentive to their wives, playing with their children, all of them fit.  One young man carried his two year old son on his shoulder, both in identical white beach shirts, sporting the same sunglasses, same facial expression, and same facial features.   No doubt what gene pool that little boy came from.

Just being around these families was energizing and hopeful.

Gibson’s Bakery

At the same time, the ruling came down that the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Oberlin College in Gibson’s Bakery’s claim against it.  The school will have to pay a $36 million dollar judgment for defaming the bakery, now that the school has run out of appeals. 

I won’t regurgitate the facts here.  The case is fully and fairly presented (both sides) in Bari Weiss’s September 1 podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/oberlin-accused-the-gibsons-of-racism-now-it-owes/id1570872415?i=1000578020237).   As someone who has worked with many family businesses over the course of my career, it was hard to listen to the facts surrounding Oberlin’s vendetta against the bakery.   Oberlin’s president either had awful attorneys or chose to stick her fingers in her ears and hum when they gave her guidance.  The Gibson family, as so many families that run bakeries, viewed their calling as a labor of love and were pillars of the community.  To hear the school students and administration set out to gratuitously destroy a multi-generation business was appalling.  The impact on the family and its employees was devastating.  I know that the Gibson’s work harder than any of those protected school administrators (and deliver more value for society).

But the final resolution gave me some hope.  At least parts of our judicial system is capable of resisting Woke ideology and is capable of delivering justice.  It was gratifying to hear that Oberlin will feel the sting of just consequences, even if those administrators don’t personally suffer any loss (after all, they are insulated, unlike the Gibson’s).

I celebrated by ordering a Gibson’s baseball cap and a box of bakery goods through the Gibson’s website.

Beyond Red and Blue

 It’s been a corrosive few weeks for national unity.  There was the F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago in which agents even went through the belongings of Melania and Barron.   Then there was the rancor between Texas and Chicago, New York and D.C. as Texas governor Abbott began to ship illegals to these putative sanctuary cities.  Finally, there was the dark and menacing speech of Joe Biden, given in front of the dark blood red background, using marines as props, telling us that MAGA Republicans represent a threat to democracy, and then threatening his own citizens with F-15’s.  And if that wasn’t enough, there were the images of armed Antifa in the background of a drag queen show for children in Texas.

Everywhere you look, it appears that reasoned argument and engagement have evaporated, and have been replaced by division, anger, bitterness and hatred.  After Biden labeled Trump voters “semi-fascist,” it took all of my self-control not to send the clip to friends of mine that voted for Biden because of Trump’s “divisiveness.”   Cable news is divided into two camps—MSNBC and Fox, basically where the narratives run in parallel universes. 

It's hard to find any platform or any person that can make fact based policy arguments or make fair evaluations, particularly of Donald Trump.  I had great hopes for Bill Barr, and I thought his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another was generally about as fair as you get, but his recent statements on the raid of Mar-a-Lago betrayed his anti-Trump bias by making inaccurate statements (storing classified materials at a country club-not true) and making several assumptions about the unprecedented raid.

Nonetheless, I have identified a number of podcasts that I believe are eminently fair.   Despite the well-deserved criticism, the technology industry has provided at least one development that is worthwhile—the podcast.  Podcasts have picked up the slack that legacy media has left and have given voice to several people that legacy media has thrown overboard.  Liberated from time constraints, podcast discussions are often more nuanced and in depth.

Quillette
Quillette was the first podcast I listened to regularly.  With the slogan “Free Thought Lives” and its dedication to heterodoxy, Quillette has mostly been a great podcast to hear free thinkers that are willing to push back on Wokeness.  Still, I lost respect for its founder Claire Lehmann when she launched a series of personal and vituperative attacks on Bret Weinstein for his skepticism over COVID restrictions and vaccines.  She also has a tendency to post somewhat revealing photos of herself to show off her fit and attractive figure on social media, which, I think actually detracts from her images as a serious intellectual.  Still, Quillette remains a good podcast if you wish to swim against the tide.

DarkHorse
DarkHorse is one of my absolute favorites.  Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists that were driven from the faculty of Evergreen State by the Woke mob, and deplatformed by YouTube, this nominally progressive couple bring reason and the scientific method to the fight.   They almost always have something interesting to say, and Weinstein was one of the first to suggest that COVID may have originated in the Wuhan Lab, and warned of the ineffectiveness and safety issues of the mRNA vaccines.  Both have been highly vocal about the corruption of science in universities.  I particularly enjoy Heather’s rants and Bret’s nerdy humor.  Both are willing to engage and have lively discussions with people with a more conservative tilt that they have, which makes this podcast most thought provoking.

Honestly with Bari Weiss
Like Weinstein and Heying, Bari Weiss is a refugee from a legacy institution—the New York Times, and she has had to find an alternative way of making a living.  She is very smart, high energy and open minded.   Hers is the absolute best podcast if you want to hear frank discussions of both sides of an issue.  Her more recent podcasts included discussions of the Oberlin College case, Election Denial, and Feminism and Sexuality.  Her interviews have ranged from Mike Pompeo to Marianne Williamson.  She is a fierce defender of the principles of free speech and is on the advisory board of both the new University of Austin and the Foundation Against Intolerance of Racism.   Who knew that I would consider a liberal liberal Jewish lesbian from the New York Times to be one of young intellectuals for whom I have the utmost respect---but so much for labels.

The Glenn Show
The odd benefit of Woke is that I was introduced to the thinking and ideas of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter—“The Black Guys.”   Loury is an economist from Brown and McWhorter, a linguist, hails from Columbia.   I rarely miss their bi-weekly discussions.  Loury is more conservative of the two but McWhorter almost always gets me thinking in a different direction.   I have a special affinity for Loury since he is originally from Chicago’s South Side and his life has had its own travails, which lends authenticity to his views.  He is certainly not a lifelong ivory tower guy.  Loury and McWhorter often have disagreements and their friendship and civility toward one another is a model for all of us.

In addition to these, I also like New Discourses by James Lindsay, which is sometimes long and detailed but provides a comprehensive analysis of Woke ideology and Marxism.   Victor Davis Hanson’s weekly podcasts are a regular for me as well as Hanson provides a historical perspective on things.  Megyn Kelly’s podcast is also quite good.  Although she tilts rights, she is open minded, is an excellent interviewer, and is open minded.   Her delightful personality comes out more in her podcast than it did on legacy media.

The four podcasts that I highlighted provide a nice balance.   In this hyperpartisan and rancorous atmosphere, it is easy to get siloed and walled off from other perspectives.  Social media and its algorithms are designed to magnify these differences and harden us into tribal camps.  The trouble with Wokeness is that it doesn’t admit or acknowledge legitimate differences of opinion and neither will it acknowledge contrary evidence—it argues with the four D’s—deny, dismiss, disparage and double down.  These podcasts allow for legitimate discourse.

 

 

 

Summer Reading List

 Now that summer is winding down, the days are shortening, and Labor Day is around the bend, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are.  On one of her recent podcasts, Megyn Kelly mentioned that she thought that Labor Day was a better day for a fresh start than New Year’s Day.   Those of us still stuck in the circadian rhythm of an academic calendar so many years later tend to agree.  Labor Day marks a “back to business” turn of the calendar after barbeques, beaches and long, soft, languorous evenings.

And as we head into fall, it seems that our society as we once knew it is being shaken to the core, values are being inverted, the elite and the criminal class are being protected, encased in protective cocoons, while the rest of us are being bullied, taxed, intimidated, and, in our inner cities, actually assaulted be the criminal class.  Institutions that we thought inviolate—the F.B.I., CDC, and our school systems from K-12 to higher education have been hijacked.   Drag queens and school librarians, and the medical profession sexualize our young children, and in the most egregious government absurdity, millions of illegals cross our border unimpeded and with them loads of deadly fentanyl while New York makes it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase whipped cream in a canister.

There are days, I am sure, that, like me, you are trying to figure out what, exactly is going on.  These are the books that I recommend to help sort things out and restore your sanity—or at least help you understand that your disorientation is warranted.

The War on the West by Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray has emerged as a leading public intellectual and a worthy heir to the position left void after the death of William F. Buckley.   I find it terribly ironic that the leading intellectuals defending Western democracy and culture are NOT American (see Yoram Hyzony below).   I list Murray’s short, succinct and very readable book as indispensable for an understanding of what we are up against—a serious attack on the West as we have seen since WWII. 

               “In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today.  For just as we are not up against justice, but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality, but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.”

If you only have time to read one, this is it.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has been deeply concerned about this revolutionary movement, a Democratic party that resembles the Soviet apparatus more closely than the working man’s Democratic party of a generation or two ago.  He cites the globalist pretensions of the elite, the open and unsymmetric trade with China, open borders and a huge unelected and powerful bureaucracy as some of the forces that are eroding America’s uniqueness. 

               “When American companies outsource their jobs overseas, the American worker usually becomes weaker, not stronger.  When elites enjoy trillions of dollars in joint-venture investments in China, they are less, not more, likely to speak out against authoritarian Chinese anti-Americanism.  When the international community seeks to establish climate change canons for the United States without a constitutionally mandated treaty, the US Congress becomes weaker, not stronger.”

Hanson’s book, along with his podcasts, keep you anchored and aware of how far we have drifted from our unified sense and purpose as a nation, as well as from Constitutional norms.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony

Hazony’s book is among the most thought provoking and enlightening to me.   I’ve struggled to decide whether I am a conservative or a libertarian, a conservative with libertarian leanings, or a libertarian with conservative leanings, and I suspect I am not alone in that regard.  Hazony, an Israeli, helped me clarify those issues and makes a compelling case as to why Jeffersonian liberalism left the door open to this neo-Marxist wave we are experiencing.   Hazony emphasizes the need for the US to return to its Christian roots (with accommodation for Judaism) a premise with which I agree.  The erosion of Christianity has allowed Wokeism to move in as a competing religion.

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher

Dreher’s book is also very short and readable.  The title taken from the quote by Aleksander Solzenitsyn, Dreher warns of the soft totalitarian encroachment by the radical Left.  Like Hazony, Dreher sees a return to Christianity as a pillar against this encroachment:

Communism had a particular ideological vision that required it to destroy traditions, including traditional Christianity.  Nothing outside the communist order could be allowed to exist…. This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.”  A person duc off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Reading Dreher, you will see why the neo-communists are eager to rewrite history (The 1619 Project) and tear down and deface our statues.

Now, it you’d rather ingest this by way of fiction, there is none other than Lionel Shriver.  She is far and away my favorite living fiction writer.

The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver

Published in 2016, before COVID and the coming of the Biden, her novel centers around a US debt crisis, and collapse of the US economy, and the ensuing social collapse and rise of an authoritarian government.  It is frighteningly prescient as some people escape to outlying states (Nevada) to attempt to put themselves beyond the reach of an authoritarian US government.

While I highly recommend The Mandibles, Should We Stay or Should We Go and The Motion of the Body Through Space also are excellent products of Shriver’s sharp, incisive mind.

I know I may have gotten this backwards---putting out the summer reading list at summer’s end, but these selections promise to enlighten you in the coming chilly autumn evenings.