If you've stopped by and are wondering why no new content has been posted for awhile, it's because we've moved (and we neglected to leave a forwarding address).
If you are still interested in some of the type of writing that has been on this blog, we are now located at:
Darkly Optimistic
www.darklyoptimistic.susbtack.com
On one hand, I am mindful of the Penn State situation. You just didn’t want to believe that Papa Joe
Paterno allowed his assistant to do the things he did right under his
nose. Similarly, the abuse of women
athletes by Larry Nassar went on unabated under the noses of coaches, the AD,
the president of Michigan State and even the FBI. I’d hate to stay in a state of denial about
the athletic program of NU..
But something doesn’t smell right about any of this. There are signs everywhere that something
else is going on here. There was no
indication that Fitzgerald had any knowledge of inappropriate behavior. None of the behavior rose to a criminal level,
nor was there any indication that any of it could have caused physical
injury. It was mostly guys doing stupid,
tribal stuff.
Fitz himself has a sterling reputation among coaches. He is a real NU guy, bleeds purple and all
that. He has taken a bottom rung program,
and usually puts a credible team on the field, even though his kids actually
have to meet certain academic standards and pass classes. None of the student athletes that I came
into contact with ever had regrets about playing there. Northwestern’s football program boasted a 98%
graduation rate last year, and placed
first or second among FSB programs in the nation. Compare that to almost any other program in
the country, where players are treated like chattel. NU players
What has my Woke detector going off are several
factors. First, this started with the
school newspaper, a notoriously leftist bunch. Second, it was an attack writ
large on the entire athletic program. It
was not focused on a single incident or set of incidents, and the allegations
were unspecific, and stitched together from disparate corners. The baseball coach was criticized as creating
a “toxic atmosphere” (a/k/a demanding hard work and consistent performance). There were allegations of racist and sexist
comments. One coach was quoted as saying
that he didn’t want a young, pretty assistant on the sideline because it would
be distracting to the players (oh, recognizing the horrors of healthy, athletic
young men acting, like, well, normal healthy, athletic young men). Most suspicious was dragging a Mr. Diaz, a kid
that graduated in ’08 to claim he had PTSD from his treatment at NU. They couldn’t dig up old claim of sexual
impropriety on Fitz himself (see the experience of Joshua Katz at Princeton and
Roland Fryer at Harvard) so they fingered his players instead.
The weird way the president handled the whole affair raises
suspicions. Michael Schill had all the
facts available to him and decided to give Fitz a two week suspension. Then, apparently under some pressure from
somewhere, he reversed himself WITH NO NEW INFORMATION and fired Fitz,
consistent with the cowardly responses to Woke pressure that is the norm in
academia.
And now, the slip and fall lawyers have gotten into the
act. One notorious race baiting lawyer
is representing 8 players in a suit against the school and Fitz. Another, Pat Salvi has said he’s going after
the women’s programs.
When you put all the pieces together, the attack on NU athletics has all the
markings of a well-planned, coordinated effort to take down the entire athletic
program at NU. Who is leading this? We may never know. The lawsuits will all likely be settled quietly
and will not reveal much.
What do I think is really going on? Leftists hate competitive athletics. And they are sneaky. If you wanted to reduce NU’s athletic
presence to DIII, the proper thing to do would be to take it through the
trustees and have a vote. But that would
have met with resistance from some large donors.
So they decided to take this route. Attack the entire program with a potpourri
of Woke bugaboos: stitch together allegations
of racism, sexism and abuse to paint a picture of an inchoate “toxic
environment” with relatively minor
incidents. Drag out resentful people that graduated long ago. And then bring in the artillery- the
plaintiff’s lawyers to destroy the program.
Of course the big game trophy was the new planned football stadium which
will now never be constructed.
Yet another academic institution has allowed the radical
Left to take control because of the lack of backbone in its president.
It this short post, I’m going to find time to express how I
feel about the moment. But that has
absolutely nothing to do with culture.
The incomprehensible mishmash that Kamala Harris vomited up
to attempt to define culture is not just an indictment of her and her profound
ignorance, but of our entire educational system—top to bottom. Kamala Harris, a
heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris attended Howard University and then
the University of California Hastings College of Law. Harris is a seasoned lawyer but it is rare to
catch her uttering a coherent phrase.
Her statement on culture was her piece de resistance—complete and
utterly meaningless drivel, followed by her signature cackle.
But this week highlighted the profound ignorance not just of
her, but of two more high profile figures of the regime—White House
spokeslesbian Karine Jean-Pierre and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never fails
to induce a forehead slap. KJP, as she
is known, who adroitly dodges most questions that penetrate deeper than asking
what flavor ice cream Biden favors this week, asserted that the Supreme Court
took away a “fundamental Constitutional right” when it determined that
affirmative action was unconstitutional and a violation of equal
protection. AOC has been barking about
investigating and issuing subpoenas to SCOTUS judges all week. Taken together, the three of these
miseducated Marxists demonstrate a shocking lack of coherence in their rhetoric
and a complete lack of understanding of how the Republic functions. If they had any dignity at all, the
institutions that educated these half-wits would offer to turn in their
accreditations. I have for several
years served as a judge for a speech and debate event for homeschooled high
school kids, and I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that the least of
those 15 and 16 year olds would run circles around the Vice President, KJP and
AOC. I know. I grade them out. KJP struggles with basic sentence
construction and subject-verb agreement, a flaw that would not get her out of
the first round at our event.
But let me give Kamala a hand with culture, and what she
should have said.
Culture is an amalgam of human behaviors and practices that
are distinct to a subset of people. It
is manifested in their language, their song, religion, lore, their literature,
their cuisine. It is made up of hundreds
of mostly unwritten rules that govern how they relate to each other. It is most certainly NOT, as Kamala said, a
“reflection of our moment” (whatever that means). It is not the here and now, but is deeply
rooted in our past, connects us to past generations, and we should seek to pass
it on to future generations. It binds
groups of people together. It provides a
person with stability and a way of viewing the world. It is often the glue that holds people
together because it is a basis for predictability of behavior.
As a nation with a large immigrant population, most of us
have been exposed to a variety of cultures brought here from their home
countries. Before we got heavily into
the corrosiveness of identity politics, it was one of the best features of this
country. In many large cities, like my
own, you could drive a few blocks and get authentic Chinese, Jewish, Italian,
Soul Food, Mexican, or Indian. To be
sure, some cultures blended together better than others. Mexicans and Poles do well and there is a lot
of intermarriage between them. Greeks
and Lithuanians tend to be a little more insular. And we know that culture implies certain
behavioral tendencies. A Jewish deli in
Chicago’s North Shore proudly sells t-shirts with their logo on the front and
that proclaim on the back, “We’re Italian Jews.
That means we’re into food AND bickering.” It’s funny, because everyone knows there is
some truth to it. That’s culture.
While we are an amalgam of many different cultures, they
have been, and need to be, subordinate to American culture. And this is the point. There is a distinctly American culture that
Kamala and her posse are fighting against.
It is rooted in our unique past, and despite the attempt to deny and
dilute it by people like Kamala, it still burns within us, although the
globalists are working overtime to erase it.
American culture is fiercely independent, defiant,
go-it-alone. This is why we have a great
entrepreneurial spirit still. We have a
rough and tumble culture—and a violent one, at that. We do not depend on the State for our
protection. And despite attempts to
erase or supplant it, we are rooted in a great religious tradition. We are risk takers. It’s in our genes. Our pioneer spirit won’t be shackled. It is a can do spirit.
We are an optimistic,
forward-looking people, not stuck in the past.
That’s why reparations won’t work and victim culture will eventually
wither and die. Because it’s not
us.
And when it becomes intolerable, we move. We don’t wallow in our misery. We moved across an ocean when Europe became
intolerable. When the East Coast became
crowded, we said, “Go West, young man.”
Today, as certain states become more totalitarian and less responsive to
its citizens, we migrate away to freer places.
California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey are draining themselves,
leaving for Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
Kamala couldn’t be more wrong. Culture is not a reflection of our moment and
our time. It is who we have been, the
legacy of our forebears propelled into the future .
Harrington begins her heretical, heterodoxical book by
announcing its very first line, “What started me down the path towards writing
this book was feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby.”
This bold and unambiguous statement is a clear shot across
the bow, aimed at feminists that have successfully detached themselves from
their reproductive selves, through availability of birth control and, in many
jurisdictions, having the right to terminate their pregnancy up to the moment
of birth. In this opening sentence,
Harrington announces that she is about to take a sledgehammer to modern
feminist thought. There is no doubt that
she would get booed off the stage at most U.S. college campuses for making such
a statement.
Harrington’s views, it seems, involved a real life pivot. She admits that she had been swept up in
postmodernism and that she had a “visceral aversion to hierarchies.” Like Bridget Phetasy, she apparently had a
string of “loose, shifting, postmodern constellations of romantic
entanglements” that she found unsatisfying.
At the same time, her startup business venture failed and the crash of
’08 caused her to re-evaluate her life, and her role as a woman. It was then that she came to the conclusion
that “Progress Theology,” the notion that things can only get better as women
become more liberated was flawed, that the “pursuit of untrammeled freedom,
mindless hedonism or the final victory of one sex over another” was a
mirage. (I also highly recommend the
podcast discussion between Phetasy and Bret Weinstein on his Dark Horse Podcast
of October 31, 2022 dealing with many of the same issues):
Having come to this conclusion, Harrington makes a number of
astute observations about how we got to this point. She is no Phyllis Schafley, nostalgic for
the white picket fences and the Ozzie and Harriet 50’s. She goes much further.
She argues that during the industrial revolution, Big
Romance (of the Jane Austen type) helped achieve a sort of balance between the
sexes. Men had a monopoly over economic
resources and women had a monopoly over sexual resources. But as we moved into the 60’s and 70’s with
the ideas of Judith Butler’s ideas that sex and gender are social constructs
taking hold, feminism began to cause a real cleavage between men and women. As technology advanced, so did the
atomization of women and commoditization of sex, beginning with the pill (and
abortion), which separated sex from procreation.
“When individuals of both sexes really can just f**k, with no material
consequences, what is even the point of going out to dinner first?” she
decries.
What most resonated with me with Harrington’s book were two
things. First, her absolute bluntness
confronting the madness of the moment. Simple
truthful statements such as, “It is physiologically impossible to gestate a
baby without involving a woman” and her assertion that men and women have innate
natures directly contradicts Butler’s premise and the wave sweeping over the
country.
Second, Harrington’s position gives some context and
intellectual heft behind some of the women that are active dissidents against
the feminist movement--- authors Peachy Keenan (Catholic- 5 children and author
of Domestic Terrorist, Bethany Mandel (Jewish – 6 children and co-author with
Karol Markowitz of Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and
Indoctrinating a Generation). Like Harrington,
these women understand that motherhood—creating and nurturing human life is at
the core of their being and purpose in life.
They understand that human flourishing for a woman does not hinge on
liberating oneself from unchosen relationships and obligations, but often
involves finding meaning in them.
Harrington’s book helped me consolidate my thinking and some
of the recent thoughts of others, like Yoram Hazony in his book, Conservatism, A
Rediscovery, in which he asserts that in Jewish doctrinal thought, having and
nurturing children IS your purpose in life, and the earlier in life you get
that started the better. The
life-giving aspect of sex was always a touchstone of Catholic doctrine. It’s no coincidence that Peachy Keenan and
Bethany Mandel have 11 children between them, and it’s also no accident that
radical Leftists Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have none.
Harrington’s position that our roles need to be rolled back
to pre-industrial society harkens back to one of my favorite old films of all
time- Heartland with Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell (1979), where Torn hires
Ferrell to help him homestead on the plains and they end up in a functional
marriage, relying on each other to survive in harsh conditions. There was not a lot of romance, just
tackling challenges together and surviving in a harsh environment with no
outside help. That scenario may be a bit extreme, but you get the point.
More writers like Harrington are coming around to see the
false god of Butler’s feminism. We do
not become self-actualized when we are liberated from all non voluntarily chosen
relationships. Real adulthood and
flourishing arises from taking responsibility and caring for another living
being, primarily manifested in your own children.
It took me awhile to cotton to the idea of Donald Trump in
the White House in 2016. Like many, I
was put off by his brash, vain and unpolished style. But as a disaffected voter, I gave him a
second look during the convention when he announced, “I am your voice.” Like most Americans, I felt that Washington
had become completely unmoored from the electorate and that the country needed
someone that was not beholden to any particular interest group, someone that
could shake things up. And Trump delivered
on a multitude of fronts, from curtailing the bureaucracy, to pushing back on
China, to browbeating the Germans into stepping up their defense commitments,
to killing Soliemeni, to the Abraham Accords, Trump showed some real moxi and
courage to do some things that needed to be done. His greatest gift was spotlighting the
necrosis that had settled in D.C. and the toxicity of the press. At the outset of Trum’s presidency,
cartoonist Scott Adams correctly predicted that, “Trump will do a lot of things
you like. But it won’t be cost free.” I was along for the ride, but fully expected
to tire of him at some point.
I have tried very hard to view Trump differently and be
neither an acolyte or a Trump hater, and assess his performance fairly and
within a historical context. It is
enormously difficult to make fair judgments about him, as the media and the
agencies distort and lie, and most of my friends and acquaintances fell into
either camp.
Again, as this election cycle begins, I have some misgivings about Trump, and I try to
organize them here.
Age
While we are focused on the age and infirmity of Joe Biden, his obvious
descent into dementia that is frightening given the challenges we face
internationally, but Trump is 76. I have
great trepidation that we are descending into an ossified gerontocracy just as
the Soviets did just before its collapse.
As someone that is north of 60, I understand that our job now is to
prepare the next generation to take the reins.
It’s their country, or will be soon.
We are being led by Dementia Joe (80), Chuck Schumer (72), and until
recently Nancy Pelosi (83). Dianne
Feinstein (89) is still clinging to her job as is Chuck Grassley(89). While he is still vibrant and energetic, this
nation seriously needs these elderly scions to step down and make room for the
next generation.
Personnel
This is a tough one because Trump, as an outsider, didn’t quite know
who to trust, and he is particularly bad at hiring lawyers. Five minutes with Michael Cohen should have
been enough to determine that Cohen was something you would fish out of the
bathtub drain trap. Same for Anthony
Scaramucci. He also failed to fire
people that he should have dismissed much, much earlier—Jim Mattis, for
one. And the most costly for Trump and
the nation—Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Jim Comey. Taken together, those three inflicted more
harm on the country than a nuclear explosion in a medium sized city.
Perhaps one of Trump’s worst flaws is his failure to discern
people to whom he owes some loyalty.
Sure, Jim Mattis, John Bolton and Bill Barr turned on him. But he threw Michael Flynn to the wolves from
the outset, and disparaged Steve Bannon (whether you like him or not). His recent disparagement of Kayleigh McEnany. She stood by him, was smart and well
prepared, and faced the hyenas in the press corp day after day. Trump had no business publicly rebuking her.
Discipline
Trump has very good instincts, especially in foreign policy. But his lack of discipline has been very
costly. He picks fights with people that
he doesn’t need to engage with. He prides
himself in being a great counterpuncher—and he is. But the forces arrayed against him,
especially in the security agencies are formidable and smart. This most recent indictment was an unforced
error. Yes, this indictment is an aspect
of the abuse of the justice system to derail a presidential candidate, but
Trump opened the door with his carelessness. As was his criticism of DiSantis for how
Florida handled Covid. Trump
unnecessarily alienated white suburban women, a constituency that would likely
have pushed him over the top in 2020 had he moderated just a bit.
So yes, these are defensible reasons to dump Trump. And I’m sure there are others that I have
missed. As a fiscal conservative, I can
also argue that he did not pay enough attention to spending and the deficit as
I would have liked.
But none of these possible objections matter now. After the indictment of Trump, an obvious
political move to take him off the game board, attempting to deprive the
American citizens of making their own decisions on him.
It’s fair game to raise issues of Trump’s sloppy handling of
some documents. But to prosecute Trump
for the same things Clinton has done, Obama has done, and Biden has done is a
bridge too far. And that’s only the
beginning. The Clinton influence
peddling and money laundering through the Clinton Foundation, the Biden family
corruption that took those techniques and raised them to a new level, filtering
funds through a labyrinth of entities to enrich his family…and of course, the
infamous Biden laptop. Add to it the
financing of BLM and Antifa and we can see that equal application of the law
has completely broken down.
I am not alone. There
are millions of people like me, that see Trump’s positive attributes as well as
his deficiencies. The decision of
whether to put him back in the White House belongs to us, not the Department of
Justice, or any local petty DA.
As the jackals in the corrupt justice system, media and in
his own party (Haley, Christie) circle to take him out, he may be the only
leader strong enough to push back on the Deep State and the Marxism that have a
stranglehold on D.C.
In normal times, there would be enough reasons to turn to
someone else. Now is not that time.
While Wokeness has made some inroads at The University of
Chicago (it recently graced Critical Race Theory with its own department – Race,
Diaspora and Indigeneity), it remains one of the few places where those
conversations can take place in public. Last
weekend, I returned to campus at the University of Chicago for a debate between
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry
Krazner (now being impeached by the Pennsylvania legislature) moderated by
University of Chicago law professor Emily Underwood. Before I get into some of the content, let me
just say that for all my dismay over the direction of the school over the past
three years, the discussion was conducted in a very civil and respectful
manner. Early on, a few in the audience
made some noises but Underwood moderator was quick to tamp it down, and it did
not recur. Despite dipping its toes in
the Wokeness waters, The University of Chicago more or less adheres to the
Chicago Principles of Free Speech. Ms. Underwood remarked that, “The one thing
that we can all agree on is that The University of Chicago changed all of us.”
Krazner opened by rationalizing the horrendous incident at
Stanford a few weeks ago in which some Stanford law students shouted down Judge
Kyle Duncan, with some students shouting such vile things at him as “I hope
your daughter gets raped.” In the
incident the school’s DEI instructor took the microphone and admonished the
judge, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
In other words, was it worth having him speak? Krazner trashed the Federalist Society (who
sponsored the event), the judge for “taking away rights” and for his non-Ivy
League credentials, stating “he has no business being on the 5th
circuit” and “doesn’t look judicial” and managed to smear Florida governor
DiSantis along with him. He reluctantly admitted
a few students went too far but did not deserve suspension or expulsion.
Turley’s initial response was simply, “Wow” then went on
calmly to admonish Krazner for rationalizations that go back centuries. There is a long history of making excuses for
silencing others. “Speech is harmful”
allows for endless tradeoffs ending in the government’s labeling of
misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (true speech used to
mislead). Turley’s flat declaration was
that the solution to bad speech is good speech.
He considers the current attack on free speech to be the greatest threat
to the country. He characterized
Krazner’s core argument as “the students went too far but it was his [Duncan’s]
fault.
Turley said that we were living in an “age of rage” but that
rage is addictive, giving us a license to silence others. This country was born in rage and silencing
others is a troubling trend. It is the
most intolerant environment he has ever seen.
On almost all college campuses, conservative and libertarian faculty,
which were always in the minority, have been largely excluded entirely.
Krasner further downplayed the Stanford incident, claiming that
an incident is not a trend. But Turley shot
back that there have been many than one incident and he tracks them. The data do no support Krasner’s defense.
Krazner then attacked the Supreme Court itself, with a claim
that the court is taking back rights, that it has become polarized and
politicized, and people have lost a lot of faith in the court. He cited “absurd” decisions about the 2nd
Amendment and railed about not adhering to precedent and kicking stare decisis
to the curb. He complained about the
undue influence of the Federalist Society on the court and the “trickery” that
was used to keep Merrick Garland off the bench.
Turley countered by stating that he had a lot of faith in
the system, that Krazner misportrays the court. In the vast majority of the
cases, the decisions are unanimous. “The
justices are not robotic idealogues,” he said., “Furthermore, we want judges to
be intellectually consistent.” He disagreed with the characterization of the
court taking away rights. Rather, these
decisions involve collisions of rights.
As the stare decisis, he commented tongue in cheek that “thankfully
Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) is still good law.” He reminded Krazner that the Warren Court
overturned 30 precedents and no one at the time claimed that was a threat to
democracy.
My bias clearly is in favor of Turley and I make the
following observations about the program:
·
Turley went out of his way to express his
fidelity to the Constitution, rather than a political party. “I haven’t liked a president since
Madison.” Turley did not even mention
Biden and only mentioned Trump in the context of discussions of the appropriateness
of impeachment.as a remedy (Turley, by the way, opposes Krazner's impeachment). At no point
did Turley disparage “liberals” or Democrats as a whole or any members of the
Supreme Court. He went out of his way to
make complimentary comments about Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. Krazner, on the other hand, ripped into the
Federalist Society, and the right wing of the court. His account of the
incident at Stanford in which he smeared Judge Duncan and excused the Stanford
law students for the shoutdown was utterly disingenuous. Duncan had a right to
speak without the “heckler’s veto.”
Period.
·
Krazner boasted that he was the first
progressive DA (Soros) and that the progressive DA’s now serve 20% of the U.S.
population and will soon expand to 30%.
He rambled on about the criminal justice complex, claiming that in areas
like Pennsylvania which lost its steel industry, that has been replaced by the
prison industry, disproportionately affecting blacks. He conveniently failed to address the crime
surge in his district and the excess deaths by violence as a consequence of his
posture.
Later in the day, I ran into Turley at the bookstore and had
an opportunity to have a chat with him, and I thanked him for his work on free
speech matters. He completed my “world
tour” of free speech scholars – Turley, Nadine Strosser (formely of ACLU) and Jason
DiSanto (Northwestern).
And while I enjoyed speaking with Turley, the most
interesting conversation I had that afternoon was with a HVAC technician. As I returned to my car, I passed two
maintenance guys- a white 50ish fellow having a cigarette break and a 30
something black fellow. They saw my
alumni badge and the older fellow said “Welcome back.” So I stopped and engaged them in conversation
for a bit. The older fellow had to take
a call and I continued with the younger guy, and we talked about careers. I told him I was less committed to college as
the right path as I once was and he lit up and told me about his own
journey. He went to a Chicago Public
High School (CVS) and grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes. He talked about the fact that CPS stopped offering
vocational classes and he thought that was a huge mistake, “Why go to college
when you can become an apprentice, make money right away and not have loans to
deal with?” We talked for a good half
hour about this. I felt so encouraged by
this conversation. I had more in common
with this young black man from the projects than I did with the smug, bombastic
Larry Krazner.
The civilized debate between Turley and Krazner and the
conversation with young maintenance guy left me with more hope than I have felt
in awhile. Free speech survives in this
redoubt, along with a bright young man from the projects that now has a bright
future in front of him.
Rochelle Walensky
Rochelle Walensky took over for Robert Redfield in January of 2021- about a
year into the pandemic. An early
advocate of the vaccines, she falsely claimed that if you took the jab, you
wouldn’t get it and couldn’t transmit the virus. Playing fast and loose with data, she failed
to distinguish deaths caused by COVID and deaths with COVID. Caving to pressure from teachers unions,
Walensky advocated school shutdowns as well.
One of my first impressions of Walensky came in March of
2021, as she addressed the nation in a halting voice, barely holding back
tears,
“I’m going to pause here. I’m going to lose the script, and
I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much
promise and potential where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now, I’m scared.”
My immediate reaction was, “What kind of leadership is
that?”
What followed throughout her tenure was data distortion,
flat out lies about the efficacy of the jab and policy recommendations that de
facto had the weight of law that inflicted devastation on our business
community, our education system, the military, and the mental health of tens of
millions of Americans. We still don’t have a good number reflecting how many
individuals died from COVID, rather than with COVID.
Most notoriously, Walensky asserted that vaccinated
individuals could not transmit the virus, and that was patently untrue. Her CDC advocated vaccinations for children
and healthy young people while ignoring the evidence that myocarditis resulting
from the vaccine was more of a risk for young men than the virus.
Walensky will never be held accountable for her lies,
distortions and bad calls. The damage
she inflicted on our society will linger for generations.
Mark Milley
While Rochelle Walensky inflicted incredible harm to our
society, particularly our youth, Mark Milley damaged our standing in the world,
emboldened our enemies, and, in an act of treason, upended the chain of
command. Like Walensky, he will never
be held accountable. Our enemies are now
laughing at us.
Milley jumped into the political fray in 2020 when he
accompanied President Trump to the burned out St. John’s church after mobs
nearly stormed the White House, then issued a statement saying that he regretted
it, and should not have been there. His
caving to political pressure was the first sign that all is not well with the
military top brass.
The most egregious blunder was his admission that he had
placed a call to his Chinese counterpart to tell him that he would give him a
heads up if Trump ordered an attack because the Chinese were worried about a
U.S. attack. He also blocked Trump’s
ability to use nuclear weapons. In our
system of government, those are not Milley’s calls to make. His job is not to
de-escalate with the Chinese. His job is
to serve the commander in chief. No one
elected him. Subverting the chain of
command is a treasonous offense, plain and simple. In an earlier era, Milley would have faced a
firing squad instead of a fat pension.
His statements about “white rage,” permitting drag queens to
perform on military bases, and his halt of operations so that the military
could purge “extremists” belied a top brass more interested in being Woke than
defending the nation.
Milley’s judgment was borne out by his results. He said he was surprised that the Afghan army
folded so quickly. Well, Mr. Milley, we
pay you not to get surprised by military developments. That is a vital aspect of the job. Of course, there is the matter of leaving
billions worth of equipment on the ground to be picked up and used by the
Taliban and bartered in the international arms trade. His second mistake in
judgment was assuming that Kiev would fold in a matter of weeks. Here we are, over a year later and the
Ukrainians have held off Putin’s forces so far.
Permitting the Chinese spy balloon to traverse the U.S.
skies unharassed, collecting sensitive military data was his last most
pusillanimous act. American citizens
were nonplussed as reports came in and people actually saw it, and the military
did nothing until it had completed its mission and was over the Atlantic. Of
course, the administration offered a variety of excuses for its inaction but
the fact remains that neither China or Russia would have permitted this over
their territory.
The consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal and Chinese
spy balloon debacles will take a generation to remediate, if they ever can be,
thanks to Milley. But Milley will suffer
no adverse consequences from the harm he has caused.
When history is written, historians will undoubtedly record
these two, along with the notorious Anthony Fauci, as the three actors that did
the most damage to the American experiment.
And if America does indeed crumble, they will be seen as some of the
major architects of its demise.
The firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News has caused quite a
stir and speculation as to the reason behind his termination. Carlson, as an outspoken critic of the Woke,
the Left, and the establishment Republicans certainly had a target on his
back. He was the subject of advertiser
boycotts, attacked as a racist and a white supremacist, doxxed and physically
threatened in restaurants and at his home.
Yet, he anchored the Fox evening lineup, and had a wide and loyal
following. Fox shares were down 5% in
the day following the announcement. The 8 p.m. slot for Fox has tanked by
two-thirds, dragging the rest of the evening lineup down with it. The people at Fox had to know that this would
be the result.
Traditionally, most organizations expend a great deal of
energy, planning, and resources to hang on to a loyal core customer base and
seek to build around it. Consulting firms,
MBA programs, and executives spend innumerable hours developing strategies to
cement loyalty among their customers.
Nonprofits—universities, charities, private schools and the like do the
same with their donors.
But in the era of Woke, we have seen the opposite
behavior. Companies and nonprofits have
demonstrated a willingness to abandon core customers or donors in their quest
to display their Wokeness.
What’s going on here?
Tucker Carlson’s abrupt dismissal and the blow to Fox News
comes on the heels of the Bud Light debacle as they appointed transgender Dylan
Mulvaney as their mascot. The Anheuser-Busch
Brand suffered a 17% loss in revenue and a 21% loss in volume in the wake of
the Mulvaney debacle. Alyssa Heinerscheid,
Bud Light’s marketing VP has been placed on leave.
It’s mind boggling to consider this Harvard/Wharton MBA grad did not
model out or anticipate the impact this decision would make on sales, the
brand, and the company’s stock price, and no one on her staff warned her off.
These are irrational business decisions, and similar
decisions are being made in board rooms across the country. The N.F.L. alienated many of its faithful
fans by backing Colin Kaepernick. Many
college alumns have stopped writing checks to their alma maters. The local Catholic high school here allowed
their largest donor to walk away over BLM.
This seems to be irrational organizational behavior to
me. Or is it? Is the Woke culture so strong that it
overwhelms ordinary marketing and finance considerations? Does it give a license to managers, trustees
and boards of directors to abdicate their fiduciary duties to the organizations
they are charged with overseeing? Do
they believe that the drop is temporary and that customers and donors will
return (as most of the NFL fans did) once the kerfuffle dies down? Or is something else going on here? In the corporate world, it’s clear that ESG
(on which I will have more to say on a later post) is giving managers an escape
hatch to allow them to duck ordinary duties to put profits first. Are these people making a conscious decision
to subordinate their organizations to the demands of Woke or are they just not
very capable?
I have heard different answers from different people on this
issue. That brand suicide is becoming more common leads me to believe that
simple incompetent planning and strategy is an inadequate explanation. Something more is going on here.
The contours of the federal government in the 20th
century were initially shaped by the Republican Roosevelt. As America industrialized, Teddy Roosevelt
established the precedent that the federal government had a role to play in
offsetting large corporate power. Known
as the trustbuster, TR used the levers of government to push back against
railroads, big steel, big coal and the like to provide a “guardian angel” to
the average American worker.
A few decades later, as the Great Depression devastated the
U.S., FDR used the federal government to attempt to battle its impact. Whatever you think of FDR, his programs were
aimed at restoring the dignity and income of the average working man. The TVA, WPA, CCC, CWA were all conceived to
provide real work and dignity to ordinary Americans. And for most of the 20th century,
Democrats counted on working people as the mainstay of their constituency and
advanced workers’ rights and unions and union membership. Again, the main constituency was Everyman.
Both TR and FDR sought to use government to protect American
worker’s ability to work and provide for his family.
But something changed, and I mark that shift with the
housing collapse in ’08 and the election of Barack Obama.
The light bulb went on for me in about 2012.
I happened to catch an episode of a home improvements show
(which my wife loves to watch). A young
black couple- both teachers—absolutely giddy over their new home. It was clear that the show was taped before
the crash. They had borrowed 95% of the purchase price. And borrowed the down payment. They were ordinary people and we all know
how that story ended.
Their lives were ruined.
They lost the house. No one
backstopped them. But the boys and girls
at Goldman Sachs and places like that had their net worths protected.
Then, hedge fund manager Cliff Asness made an astute
observation. He distributed a Venn
Diagram with overlapping circles that showed the Tea Party on one side and
Occupy Wall Street on the other.
Although the constituents are almost polar opposites in the nominal
political parties they support, he noted that they were mostly complaining
about the same things.
That’s when it became clear to me that the Democratic party
(and the Republican establishment) primarily backstopped the Professional Managerial
Elite.
The next big thing, of course, was COVID.
For everyman, there were rules, lockdowns and
shutdowns. The local bagel deli was
shut and could only do takeout. But
Walmart stayed open. The local bookstore
was shuttered. But Amazon was hardly
impacted. Independent restaurants were
closed, wrecking the livelihoods of thousands of hardworking entrepreneurs. The most pernicious aspect of this was that
certain of the Professional Managerial Elite were deemed to be “essential
workers” and were allowed to return to their offices, while other working men
and women were confined to their homes. Landlords
(most of whom are independent property owners)
were barred from enforcing their rights to evict for nonpayment of rent. In some egregious situations, landlords were
living out of their cars while tenants refused to pay rent and thumbed their
noses at landlords.
During the Floyd riots, people were allowed to protest,
riot, and attend mass funerals for the career criminal George Floyd. Politicians were allowed to get their hair
coiffed, eat at restaurants unmasked,
and go on vacation, all in violation of the rules government officials
established.
In responding to the two big adverse events- the housing
crash of ’07-’08, the federal government acted to protect the elite and crush
average Americans.
And this theme shows no evidence of reversing itself. The government responded to the insolvency of
Silicon Valley Bank by guaranteeing all deposits, even thought the limit is
$250,000 per depositor. Silicon Valley
Bank’s depositors are mostly the wealthy venture capital funds or companies
owned by wealthy venture capital funds.
Yet in the same month, when East Palestine, Ohio was turned down for
emergency funds and virtually ignored by the feds when a train derailment
unleashed an ecological and health catastrophe.
It's very clear that at least since the election of Barack
Obama, the Democratic party (and the federal government when it is in power) has
morphed into something very different. It
uses its power and influence to guarantee economic outcomes for the elite. Unlike FDR, it does not try to create
conditions for working class employment, but simply to transfer wealth to “marginalized
peoples” and empower the criminal class.
Average working people are ignored, held in contempt or affirmatively
shut out.
It is now the Barbell Party.
It advocates the interests at both ends but nothing in the middle.
There are a few problems with his tweet, not the least of
which is that it is inaccurate and disingenuous. Jeffries uses the phrase “reproductive
freedom” but he really means “abortion.”
Further, abortion rights and limitations on it ARE negotiable, and as a
society, we mostly arrived at an uncomfortable negotiated settlement—first
trimester abortions were ok; no public funds to be used to finance them.
But, as usual, the Radical Left couldn’t stick to a deal and
they pushed abortion to the moment of birth (and maybe a little after if the
baby survived) and pushed to reverse the Hyde Amendment which barred the use of
public funds for abortions. The Dobbs
decision solidified the notion that this issue IS negotiable as it kicked it to
the states.
But if we’re going to talk about non-negotiables, I have a
list of my own. As I discussed in my
last post, Majorie Taylor Greene caused quite a kerfuffle when she publicly
asked for a national divorce, with some even calling her treasonous. But if Jeffries is going to issue edicts that
are nonnegotiable, here are some non-negotiables if we are to stay together as
a nation. Otherwise, I believe that we
do stand a good chance of fracturing.
Sovereignty
We are a nation state with territorial integrity. This means no open border, no Chinese spy
balloons floating across our territory unharassed, and no handing decisions
over the freedoms of our peoples to foreign bodies like the WHO. Absolutely not. Full stop.
The notion that anyone can walk into this country and stay
in violation of our laws—and get state benefits for doing so must cease. We can have a discussion over how many
immigrants are allowed to enter, but the notion that our immigration laws will
not be enforced, and worse, that certain jurisdictions can declare themselves
“sanctuary cities” harkens back to nullification, and we know where that went.
Moreover, while we from time to time need to enter into
treaties with other nations, we must do so while preserving our own
sovereignty. This notion that the U.S.
will hand over its response to a pandemic to the WHO (which misled during the
entire COVID pandemic) is utterly abhorrent.
Treaties are treaties and approval must conform to the approval set
forth in the Constitution--- not by executive fiat.
Restoring our full sovereignty is nonnegotiable and is a
priority of first order if we are to stay together as a republic.
Roll back and De-weaponize the Administrative State.
The Administrative State makes law, prosecutes and adjudicates, all without
consent of the sovereign. Its power was
on full display during COVID lockdowns, inflicting massive pain on businesses
and families. The CDC even took a meat
cleaver to fundamental concepts of private property by permitting tenants to
refrain from paying rent without any recourse from landlords. This resulted in disfigured and warped
situations where some landlords were living in their cars while tenants were
warm and comfy in their homes and not paying rent. The Founders never envisioned that unelected
bodies would have this kind of power.
The most egregious symptom of administrative state overreach
has been the weaponization of the enforcement agencies for political
purposes. With limited exceptions, for
most of our nation’s history, we counted on the enforcement agencies such as
the FBI and IRS to play it straight.
Since the Obama years, this is no longer the case and is a real danger
to the Republic. It started in earnest
with Lois Lerner at the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, dragging its feet in
granting exemptions. It then got very
ugly with the FBI, as it falsified documents for the FISA Court, harassed
pro-life conservatives, raided Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence, paid social media
to censor conservative viewpoints, and holding on to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
We cannot have enforcement agencies turn into the Stasi to
punish political enemies, target certain groups or surveil American citizens
with an end around the 4th Amendment. Weaponizing these agencies is
non-negotiable.
Election Integrity
Election denier has now become a thing.
Beginning with the 2000 election of Bush v. Gore, we have begun to
challenge election results. But just as
important as determining a winner, our system has to persuade the loser that the
results were accurate and fairly determined.
COVID, mail-in ballots, and rule changes blew that out of the
water.
The midterms evidenced worse defects. In Pennsylvania, 70% of the ballots were
received before the debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman clearly showed
Fetterman’s mental deficiencies. In
Arizona, substantial numbers of voters in key districts were likely
disenfranchised because of glitches with the voting machines enabling Katie
Hobbs to snatch the election from Kari Lake.
We have tossed illegals into the mix, early voting, ballot
harvesting and some states now permit ballots to arrive long after election day
with no signature verification. All
these things conspire to through into question the results of elections. And if we can’t determine policy choices at
the ballot box, they will eventually be made through mob rule and violent
action.
Restoring election integrity, with severe limitations placed
on mail-in ballots and early voting is non-negotiable if we are to stay
together.
Protections for Women and Children
A society that doesn’t provide special protections for women and
children is doomed. Over the past five
years, the Woke movement has destroyed them.
Women’s sports has been ruined by the transgender movement as women are
now forced to compete with biological males in all sports—including swimming,
powerlifting, hockey and MMA. The
absurdity of it all reached an apogee with Lia Thomas cleaning up the Ivy
League while all of the other women stood looking dispirited and dumbfounded. Not only are they forced to give back all the
gains that Title IX afforded women, but their privacy rights are being invaded
in the name of “inclusivity” as their
locker rooms and showers are invaded by wagging penises. California prisons now permit men that
identify as women to be placed in women’s prisons. And we know where that goes. The media is on board with this charade, using
the words “persons with a uterus” and “chestfeeding” to further denigrate
women’s role in a healthy society. Even
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stumbled over the question, “What
is a woman?” deferring that she “was not a biologist. It’s a question most of us could answer that
by 1st grade without biological training. Discussion of putting women in front line
combat roles deserves its own essay, and I will refrain from commenting here.
Most maddening is the assault on the minds of children. It started with drag queen story hour through
the library system, aimed at 3-8 year old children, and has now graduated to
“gender affirmation” hormone treatments and disfiguring surgery, as well
documented by Abigail Shrier in her book Irreversible Damage. I won’t repeat her arguments here, but the
fact that the transgender activists have captured the American Medical Association
and American Psychological Association as well as many school systems is deeply
disturbing. Psychiatrists can only
“affirm” a child’s self-diagnosis that they are another gender, taking away a
primary role of the profession—to diagnose.
And school systems and libraries are exposing children as young as
kindergarten to genderism with explicit materials in school libraries. Objections to age appropriate materials are
met with howls and shrieking “Book Burners.”
Of course, this is nothing of the sort.
Nobody sought to ban drag queens or explicit materials until they
started dragging our kids into it. As
pedophiles desperately tried to latch on to the LGBT movement, they attempted
to change the designation to “minor attracted persons” and California has
changed its laws to loosen criminal penalties and make prosecutions much harder
for such offenses.
A healthy nation provides special protections for women and
children. It is a nonstarter at keeping
this nation together. They are our
future. It is a hill to die on.
DEI, CRT and
Reparations
This has to go. Now. These are very,
very bad and corrosive ideas, tearing at the fabric of our society. We can stipulate that slavery and Jim Crow
were terrible and that they had long term effects. But we don’t hold the grandchildren of the
Nazis accountable for what their grandfathers did. DEI, CRT and reparations have to be torn out
root and branch. DEI and CRT have
largely accomplished three things—none of them good. They have destroyed merit in business and
academia. They have created a class of
college education make work workers- DEI officers. And, along with the thought of reparations,
are creating a lot of resentment with a threat of a real backlash.
The emphasis on diversity and inclusion must be replaced by
an emphasis on social cohesion and merit.
In a multi-race, multi-ethnic nation, social cohesion is a greater
virtue than any attempt to remediate past wrongs. Our nation is fundamentally a forward
looking one, not backwards looking. Attempts
to do so will only be counterproductive.
We need to go back to the MLK precepts
of judging people by the content of their character. To do otherwise runs the risk of devolving
into Rwanda, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, or South Africa. The track record is very clear.
So, Mr. Jeffries, this is MY list of non-negotiables. Majorie Taylor Greene might be viewed as a
right wing zealot, but if we cannot restore these four points, I do not wish to
share a polity with those that would deny them.
That they are even up for discussion is patently revolting to me and they
must be put back in their proper place—and soon or a national divorce (and I prefer
not to have one) is in order. But we
simply cannot go on like this.
This era will not pass easily, I fear. In a highly unscientific poll I conducted
among some well-informed friends and acquaintances just prior to Covid, when
asked whether the United States would continue to exist as a single sovereign
entity 10 years from now, 14 said yes, 11 said no. Of the 14 that said yes, 2 said yes with the
caveat that it would exist 10 years from now, but not 25. Admittedly, this was a small, and likely
biased sample, but the numbers led to the conclusion that the U.S. cannot be
counted on, that a substantial number of people believe that the American
Experiment is unwinding.
Here are the six factors that permitted our Republic to
become unstable—so unstable that “national divorce” was recently trending on
Twitter.
China
Our false assumption about China is probably the single biggest misstep
that damaged our nation. And this was a
bi-partisan error. It started as an attempt to triangulate our
posture in the Cold War with Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Within
a short time following the Tiananmen Square massacre, our government pretended
it didn’t happen and China was admitted to the WTO in 1995. With that door open, China used that to
systematically strip out our manufacturing base, steal our intellectual
property, and then send their youth to the U.S. to be educated (see below) in a
totally one-sided deal
As recently as 5 years ago, the free market gurus at the
University of Chicago were still chirping that China would have to respond to
its burgeoning middle class as its wealth grew and the regime would be forced
to moderate. There was very little
dissent from that premise. A few lone
voices like John Mersheimer, who asserted, “You do not want China to become
rich” were dismissed as cranks. Libertarians
like Deirdre McCloskey derided Trump’s attempt to correct this one way street
in part through tariffs as “just plain stupid.”
The consequences of this error are grievous and were the
exact opposite of what the “experts’ predicted.
China became more aggressive and tyrannical, reneged on its deal with
Hong Kong, built a formidable military and is now threatening Taiwan. It destroyed countless industries and small
towns and deprived us of continuous opportunities to innovate and improve as
factory floors moved to China. Enabling
the rise of a peer competitor will be seen as one of history’s greatest
bludners.
Higher Education
Jonathan Cole wrote The Great American University ten years ago. In it, he correctly claimed that the United
States higher education system was the envy of the world, with the U.S.
claiming almost all of the top universities in the world, with Columbia and The
University of Chicago as the finest.
Even better, we ran parallel systems—private and public universities
that competed with each other for students and faculty and it made both better.
My, how far things have fallen. While there remain pockets of excellence,
mostly in STEM departments, higher education is in a shambles, and many people,
including Daniel Pipes, are predicting its collapse. Like leukemia, critical theory has gotten
into its bones, and rotted the entire system from within.
Almost every bad idea has emerged from this poisonous
system. From denying basic
Constitutional rights to a fair trial and free speech to renewing segregation
emanated from college campuses.
Hatred of Western Civilization and America’s miraculous founding is bred
there. Yale, for instance, ceased
teaching its course in Western Art. The
University of Chicago is now proposing to teach a course entitled “The Problem
of Whiteness.” The University of
Illinois requires faculty to write an affirmative diversity statement to be
considered for tenure. Good luck getting
a faculty job in any humanities, history, or English department if you are
conservative or libertarian.
Administrative State
It is now widely accepted- even by our own government, that the most
likely genesis of COVID was the Wuhan Lab, funded in part by our own government
and the notorious Dr. Fauci, through EcoHealth Alliance. Fauci himself not only helped fund gain of
function research that led to this dark chimera, he recommended masking and
lockdowns, that did more damage to the U.S. population than a nuclear device
set off in a medium sized city. The CDC
under Rochelle Walensky fortified his position, stripping Americans of many
civil liberties, pushed vaccine mandates (even among children that present no
risk), abrogated property rights by recommending rent abatement, and
distorting, lying and demonizing anyone that took an opposing position (i.e.
the Barrington Group).
The CDC and NIH need to be razed for doing what they did to
us.
But the damage doesn’t end there. The EPA, Department of Education, Energy
Department all have developed a life and accrued power unto themselves never
envisioned by the nation’s founders.
These agencies act separate and apart from our lawmakers and are wholly unresponsive
to the will of the people.
But wait, it gets worse.
Over the past decade or so, enforcement agencies like the IRS and the
FBI—agencies that we count on to play it straight have become political
weapons, acting in a wholly partisan fashion to punish political enemies in a
very Stasi-like fashion. The F.B.I. is
probably the worst of them, actively hiding the criminality of Hunter Biden,
entrapping Michael Flynn, the “kidnap
plotters” of Gretchen Whitmer and most likely the January 6 protesters as
well.
Meanwhile, the agencies we count on to protect us—the Defense
Department have been overrun by a group of technologically backwards sheep
herders in Afghanistan and permitted a slow moving balloon to traverse the
entire U.S. gathering intelligence.
Our administrative state is utterly out of control.
Tribalism and the Criminal Inversion
These go hand in hand so I lumped them together. By pushing the “systemic racism” myth, black
Americans that act badly have been able to escape the consequences of their anti-social
behavior. Moreover, in a warped effort
to increase black “achievement,” the bar for performance has been lowered in
all aspects of life—from college and graduate school admissions to promotions
in the workplace, what I have called a Reverse
Apartheid has set in. Stanford
University’s incoming class is 22% white despite whites being 68% of the
population. United Airlines says it
wants 50% of the pilots in it pilot
training to be black. In cities like
Chicago, which is nearly evenly divided among whites, Hispanics and blacks, it
is nearly impossible to get a job in city government with any power unless you
are black. This state of affairs is
breeding deep resentment.
Worse, is the celebration of the criminal class. Whatever your view of the George Floyd
incident, to have statues erected to this career criminal—a guy who was so bad
that society put him away for 5 years—is obscene and ludicrous. The same thing for Jacob Blake. Blake it will be recalled, dove under a car
seat groping for a weapon after police told him to stop and he was shot as a
result. Kamala Harris jumped on an
airplane to visit him and told him she was “proud of him.”
A society that reverses an emphasis on achievement and
merit, and not only tolerates but erects statues and paint murals celebrating
criminals is in deep, deep trouble.
Misalignment
In a happier time, the nation achieved a balance, however imperfect. Government kept a watchful eye on business,
so that it could not get too powerful and unaccountable. The press kept a watchful eye on government
to the same end. But now government, big
business, and media have all moved to the same side of the equation, with the
citizenry on the other side.
Government is supposed to protect people against threats
larger than they can themselves handle.
Yet in the last two large disasters it moved not to protect the bulk of
Americans but to protect the elite.
Whatever you think about Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression,
his policy moves were aimed at lifting average Americans. The policy moves in response to the Great
Recession of ’07-09 and Covid hung average workers and small business owners
out to dry while the weight of government protected the elite—Wall Street
bankers and big business. The local pub was
required to be closed during Covid but Walmart could sell cases of beer.
The forces tearing at our republic are numerous and
complex. I have highlighted just a
few.
We are in the most tumultuous time since WWII and I believe
that freedom, liberty and truth will prevail in the long run. But the next decade will be rough.
In his January 23 piece in The American Conservatism, Dreher
asks “What was the Woke Tipping Point?”
Dreher asks what one event over the past 20 years led to the mess
America is in? Dreher concludes that the
single event that has led to the Woke-tastrophe was the failure to pass the
Federal Marriage Amendment, and the Obergefell decision, which would have codified traditional marriage
into the Constitution.
What
Was The Woke Tipping Point? - The American Conservative
Dreher is partially correct. He asserts, “The loss of the one-male and
one-female binary as the exclusive model for marriage was the turning
point….Recognizing that wokeness is a broad phenomenon, if I had to pick a
single event as the most causative of advancing wokeness, I would say the
Obergefell decision Constitutionalizing same sex marriage.
I think Dreher is
partially correct, but only partially. It
is difficult to pin the Wokification of America on a single event or
source, He is correct that the erosion
of marriage and the family unit is a significant aspect of Woke. The Obergefell decision came soon
thereafter, wiping out the tradition of state jurisdiction over the governance
of marriage and eradicating any local democratic input over how people wish to
construct the mores of their society. The
transgender movement quickly latched on the to gay rights movement (the fight
over transgenders in bathrooms began days after the Obergefell decision came
down), followed by the push to sexualize children through Drag Queen Story Hour
and “gender education” schools. Dreher
is right to point all this out.
But Dreher frames Wokeism incorrectly. He contends that The Great Awokening covers “sex,
gender, and race”. He is incorrect and
by not framing it up correctly, he inadvertently cripples our ability to fight
back.
Wokeness is comprised of three prongs. Or as I call it, the Woke holy trinity. They are taken as an article of faith and
questioning them is an act of blasphemy in Woke society. Dreher names only 2 of them and, as a result,
gets the inflection point wrong. The
holy trinity of Wokeness is gender ideology, racial justice, climate
change.
The Woke Tipping Point was the election of Barack Obama. Obama didn’t emphasize gender ideology. In fact, early in his political career, he said
that marriage was between a man and a woman- then pivoted.
But his zeal was placed on “racial justice,” whatever that
means, and in particular he is the individual that is singularly responsible
for the violent crime that roils our big cities now. He set the tone early, falsely smearing the
Cambridge police acted “stupidly” for questioning Henry Louis Gates. Trayvon Martin looked like the son he didn’t
have, even though Zimmerman was found to have used justifiable force in
repelling Trayvon. His administration
set the wheels in motion in Chicago with his consent decree that hamstrung
police officers. He demonized the police
at every turn and, along with his sugar daddy, George Soros, got numerous pro-criminal
DA’s elected. Obama’s clever emphasis on
“diversity” meant the lowering of standards everywhere== in academia, in the workplace, in housing, and
institutionalizing a de facto reverse apartheid in government and in large
corporate life. In Chicago, for
instance, which is roughly divided among equal thirds among Whites, Hispanics,
and Blacks, Whites and Hispanics are mostly frozen out of any city government
jobs that matter.
Obama fully embraced the third prong of Wokeness—climate
change tyranny. He limited oil and gas leases
on federal lands and killed the Keystone pipeline the first time around. Worse, he sent eco-tyrant John Kerry to sign
on to the ill-advised Paris Accord, which, among other things, obligated the
U.S. to adhere to caps on emissions, while letting China and India off the hook
for years—all the while permitting China to frantically construct scores of
coal plants. Even more absurdly, Obama
committed the U.S. to be a major financier of a “green fund” which was to fund
“green projects” in third world countries- again, a fund to which India and
China were not obligated to participate in.
And because we run persistent deficits, we’ll end up borrowing some of
those funds from—you guessed it—China.
The Obergefell decision was certainly an important milestone
that helped to anchor the Woke movement, but LGBT ideology and its effect on
the family is only one of the three prongs of Woke. Obama’s election provided the accelerant to
the other two. Radical environmentalism
under the banner of climate change, which threatens to destroy American
capitalism and “social justice” and “equity,” which threatens social cohesion were
seeded by Barack Obama. He is rightly the godfather of the Woke
movement.
