Bloodless Revolution (so far)

 

Let me try to make sense of all this for you and give you my interpretation of what has occurred to our great nation.

You can choose to believe me or not and in the coming weeks, we will likely see more evidence pile up that my interpretation is the correct one.  If it turns out that I am incorrect, I will be happy to admit it.

If everything seems confusing to you, it is meant to be.  That means it’s working.  You don't know for sure who really won the election because the evidence of fraud was never heard.  You don't know who perpetrated the chaos in the Capitol building because the media told you it was Trump insurrectionists.  You don't know why the Christmas bombing that killed no one occurred in Nashville because after only 48 hours, the FBI told you it was a lone wolf.  You don't even know who will be president with any certainty.  You know that this bumbling, stumbling, dementia ridden old fool is not capable.  

I am going to tell you in a blunt way, so you can look straight at it and deal with it.

We all were overjoyed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  It turns out that our celebration was premature.   The fight against Communism wasn't over.  It was only halftime.

The American Experiment is over.   I don’t say that lightly and without a great deal of grief and sorrow in my heart.   The tables have been flipped on us.   What has been done to us is what we were able to do to Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973 and Afghanistan in 2002.   We have lost our Republic.

There were lots of clues leading up to this, if you listened carefully.  Probably the most salient clue was the purported last words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “My most fervent wish is that I not be replaced until a new president is installed.”  That was an important quote for two reasons.  First, RBG never said it.  This is what the media said she said.  RBG would NEVER have said that.  She was a supreme court justice, and excellent lawyer, and a person who understood the importance of word choice.  We do not install a president and RBG knew that.  This quote was manufactured just as the Russian hoax was, the “many fine people” hoax was, and the “bat soup” story was.  It never happened but the words are telling, because that is what happened.  Biden was installed.

Some have called it a “Color Revolution,” and it certainly looks like one.   I coined my own term for it

A Techno-Bolshevik Revolution with a Reverse Apartheid Twist

Like the 1979 Iranian Revolution, this revolution relied heavily on a coalition of support—Antifa and BLM (which had a significant element of white youth involved) to perpetrate violence all summer.  The violence was staged as an implicit threat to the Supreme Court of what would happen if it ruled with the Trump administration.  And it worked—perfectly.   SCOTUS kicked away the challenges on procedural grounds, even though the last minute voting rule changes by governors, secretaries of state and judiciaries were eminently justiciable as violations of the Constitution which require legislatures to choose electors.  Media fully cooperated by withholding damning evidence on Hunter Biden, calling states early and proclaiming Biden the winner.   Then, it shut out Trump completely and incredibly banned him from social media.

Like our own Revolution, this one also had an outside power giving a big assist--- China.   China’s goals are to displace the U.S. as the global financial and economic power.   It simply could not tolerate another 4 years of Donald Trump, because Trump was on to their game.  As with RBG’s quote, I do not think it is a coincidence that COVID19 appeared on the horizon just as soon as the CCP figured out that the impeachment proceedings were going nowhere.   The conventional view was that it would be crazy to use a bioweapon, because you couldn’t control it and you could suffer large numbers of deaths in your own country.  But with a population that is aging, it is a small price to pay for crippling and dividing the West, especially the U.S.  I believe that it is more likely than not that COVID19 was a bioweapon attack.

This time, Communism wasn't going to make the same mistake it did last time.  Somehow, it got to the Vatican.  Communism underestimated the strength of the Catholic Church in the 80's and the influence of John Paul II.  Either with money or subterfuge, Benedict took early retirement and Communism found a pliable figure in Francis, who mostly spouts of decrees that are indistinguishable from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and rails against Trump but is steadfastly silent when it comes to China's human rights crimes.  He has said nothing about the arrest of Jimmy Lai, the top Catholic voice in China, and dissident nuns and priests in the underground.  Not a word.  The Vatican has been effectively neutered as an opposing force.

In America, the two-party system in America is gone.  With radical Democrats in full control, they will attack the filibuster, pack the court, attempt to do away with the Electoral College, offer statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico—all things that kept a two party system viable.

The Bill of Rights is gone.  With Big Tech silencing you, your voice will not be heard unless you wish to go back to handing out flyers.  And if you dare express a conservative viewpoint, the mob may cancel you anyway.   Using COVID19 as a pretext, your freedom to worship has been negated as has your freedom of assembly (unless you are protesting on behalf of BLM).   Private property rights have been shattered. You may no longer evict tenants in many jurisdictions and as we saw with the gym operator in New Jersey, the state will take all of your property if you defy it.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights now are like tattered sheer curtains blowing in the breeze.  AOC and the media are openly talking about de-programming and re-educating Trump supporters.   The PBS lawyer who was caught talking about taking children from their parents and putting them in camps was not engaging in bluster.  They mean it.  Critical Race Theory has been adopted in so many school districts,  in government offices, and in many corporations.  The camps are effectively in operation for the most part.  You just go to them.  Soon, you won't have a choice.

The Left will continue to hound Donald Trump after he leaves office.  Deutsche Bank will begin to foreclose on his properties.  The New York AG will find some trumped up charges to bring against him.  Former General Mattis has said he plans to make him “a man without a country.”  Hillary wants Trump's phone records to see if he contacted Putin on January 6.  This is all third world dictatorship stuff.  None of it is normal.

Dispatching 30,000 troops to the Capitol for inauguration sends a clear message to the American people.  And its not one that a duly elected president would send.

Swallow hard.   You know what has happened. A revolution has occurred. The America that our Founders created for us is gone and we need to come to terms with that.  In subsequent posts I will discuss what this means and what conservatives and libertarians and Constitutionalists can and should be doing- at least until I get deplatformed (and then I will find another route)  For now, let us take time to grieve and mourn and gather ourselves.

For now, educate yourself.  Educate yourself on how Communism and a totalitarian state operates.  Watch the films The Lives of Others, Never Look Away and Mr. Jones.  Read the writings of the dissidents-- Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Benda, and those that resisted the Nazis, like Primo Levi and Victor Frankl. 

Prepare yourselves.

Resolutions

 

The picture I posted is an actual flyer that I pulled from a bulletin board at UIC aa couple of years ago that sent a shock through me as if I had jumped into Lake Michigan in January.  It should shock you.  But this is what is at stake now, and their movement is on a fast track.   And it demands that our adjustments need to be on a fast track as well.  This is truly evil stuff we’re facing, as evil as Nazism and Stalinism.  And that’s not hyperbole.  It’s real.   To my Jewish friends that have bought into the Socialist/Woke movement, please start paying close attention.  This is where it’s headed and it is deadly serious stuff.

The turn of the calendar is traditionally the time we take a look back on the events of the past year, and look forward to a fresh start with new goals and new commitments.  There is something deeply embedded in our nature to do this.  It is so vital to our being that Catholicism makes it a sacrament.  Confession allows an individual to expunge his or her shortfalls, and liberated from them, to start afresh.

Now that the Socialist/Woke coup is nearly complete, I’ll need to adjust how I approach them.  And going into 2021, the adjustment requires even more thought and consideration.   Typically, I do not share my goals with anyone—they are very private matters.  But this year, I’m going to break with precedent and make part of my 2021 resolutions public.   Some aspects of them are not really new resolutions—I just thought about them in a more coherent and organized way.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, like one of those last Japanese holdouts on an island after WWII had ended, you know that something fundamental is happening to our society.  In later posts, I will try to provide my take as to what is really going on to try to bring some clarity (it is all meant to be confusing).  But at the root of some of this chaos and discord is Critical Theory, a pernicious, racist, Neo-Marxist philosophical movement that is fundamentally anti-Western, anti-individual and anti-liberty.  It is threatening to dismantle and neuter Western Civilization and has already commandeered large swaths of our society.   It anesthetizes you with benign sounding words and phrases:  “Black Lives Matter,” “Gender Neutral,” “Build Back Better,” “Reimagine”  and, of course, the very soothing and virtuous sounding words, “Social Justice” and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Who can argue against black lives mattering, or inclusiveness?    But it is every bit as harsh, brutal and unforgiving as the Marxist/Leninist regime that our grandparents faced, only much more sophisticated and technologically enabled.  We do not yet have a gulag, although that may be coming.  The Critical Theorists may have figured out that they don’t need to do such things.   They would actually prefer coerce compliance in more subtle ways.  But they will when they learn that this isn't working.

And it’s not in some far off outpost.  It’s here, coursing through the veins of our institutions—our large corporations, banks, law firms, and especially our cultural and educational institutions.   It is designed to kill the soul of the individual and subsume you into the collective.   Like the xenomorph in the franchise film Alien, it has adapted its defenses.

 I am a dissenter.  I will not be checking my imagined privilege.   I will not be embracing diversity, equity and inclusiveness.  And I will risk being labeled, marginalized, shunned, and even imprisoned.  So here are some of the resolutions I am committing to this year.

-Disconnecting

I will completely disconnect from institutions and people that espouse or promote Critical Theory/Wokeism (which includes BLM).  This process is already underway.   I turned off the N.F.L., terminated my subscription to the New York Times and to The American Scholar when it featured a cover article “The Problem With Whiteness.”   I stopped my membership at the American Writers Museum when it featured a program with Kathy Griffin and stopped my support of The Newberry Library when it ran Drag Queen Story Hour, aimed at 5-8 year olds.  When the Newberry Library wrote an impassioned piece about changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day, I suggested that the institution step up and deed the land on which the library sits back to the tribe from which it was “stolen.”  I received no reply.

Perhaps the most difficult severing is my relationship with The University of Chicago, my alma mater.  I have always felt blessed to have received two degrees from that institution.  But I began to see signs that the university was slipping into Wokeness a couple of years ago and it astounded me how quickly it sank into the morass.   Earlier this year, economics professor Harald Uhlig was targeted for merely suggesting that BLM not make defunding the police a part of their platform, which created a firestorm.  The university responded by  vowing to review all of his social media posts for signs of racism.   Then there was the English Department’s decision to only admit graduate students that were interested in Black Studies, which I wrote about.  Finally, there was the attack on science professor Dorian Abbot.   Abbot raised issues with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies of the university, expressed his view that the university should hire the best, no matter what color, and was promptly mobbed.   Colleagues and students issued a series of demands on the university, stating that if he just wanted to hire the most talented, then “you are part of the problem.”   The university, to its credit, reaffirmed its Chicago Principles of free speech but at the end of its statement reaffirmed its commitment Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, not realizing that free speech and DEI are incompatible and eventually free speech will have to go, and Chicago Principles will eventually lose out. 

Perhaps the worst sign that the university has fallen to the CRT mob has been the Booth School of Business, which instituted “white privilege” questions in its leadership course survey and committed to unconscious bias training.  A school that purports to be at the forefront of quantifiable management techniques and empiricism decides to adopt training to cure a problem that the UK recently decided is utterly ineffective.

Of course, there was the decision to admit ONLY students that are interested in Black Studies next year, a topic that I previously blogged about (Common Sense: A Letter to My First Professor (commonsense-mark.blogspot.com).   Again, with great irony its justification for doing so was written in the most incomprehensible, gummy prose.  So much for Dickens and Chaucer. 

The University that I loved and is so much a part of my identity simply does not exist anymore.  And I will no longer support it or engage with it.  I have a reunion coming up that I will take a pass on and will not participate in the class gift.   I have great memories and great reverence for what the university is and what it did for me and it pains me greatly to watch the CRT barbarians breach the walls and begin to overrun the place. 

-Speaking and Acting Truth and Refuse to See Race.

I will speak truth in my life and in my blog.  I will call out DEI for what it is—a form of reverse apartheid.  I will call out BLM for what it is—a Marxist organization committed to undermining Western Civilization.  

I will not participate in unconscious bias training, ever.   My biases are pretty conscious.   If you have a good attitude and perform, I like you and will want you as part of my team.  If you have a poor attitude and do not perform, I do want to exclude you.  Period.  Your skin color matters not a whit to me.   I will not respect any  artificial boundaries of inclusion.   Indeed, excellence REQUIRES exclusion and it has nothing whatsoever to do with skin pigmentation.  To suggest that it does is rationalizing blather. 

I will continue to live by the creed of MLK and judge people for what they are, not by the color of their skin.  My credo will be Refuse to See Race.  Absolutely and without exception.  I will only see race as a descriptive term if there is criminal activity involved--- the carjacker was Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, etc.  Otherwise, race doesn’t figure into my consideration at all.   I judge you by your words and behavior---nothing else.  Hence the sleight of hand of Black Lives Matter.  Yes, black lives do, indeed, matter, but so does black behavior.  I will not hesitate to call out bad behavior, no matter what your skin pigmentation.  So all this stuff about being sensitive to other cultures is nonsense.  Yes, I’m good with cuisine, art, literature and music (except violent misogynist rap music).  But if your culture involves honor killings, female genital mutilation, burkas, having 5 kids from 5 different fathers I have to support, carjackings and such, I will not hold back my contempt for those aspects of someone’s culture.  And I’m not going to walk on eggshells talking about it.

Networking

I will distance myself from individuals that are hawking, supporting or expressing sympathy with Critical Theory   CRT has begun to encroach in my personal relationships as well.   When one of my old classmates sent me an email with “To My White Friends” in the subject line, I responded on my blog and deleted him from my contact list.  Next time he is in town and contacts me for a get together, I’m sure to be tied up and unavailable.  As I would with a proselytizing religious fanatic, I have better things to do.  This isn’t an intellectual game anymore to be played in the campus coffee shop.  These zealots are putting their racial and economic views into action.  And I know where this leads.  

Likewise, I automatically disconnect from anyone on LinkedIn that (i) uses preferred pronouns in his or her profile, (ii) wears a mask in his or her profile picture, or (iii) posts political preferences.  Several people posted congratulatory messages on LinkedIn regarding Kamala Harris.   Beep.  Gone.  No one would dare post anything suggesting support for Donald Trump, or any other Republican for that matter. 

Finally, Facebook is no longer part of my life.  After seeing the misguided posts regarding the Covington incident and Nick Sandmann (as well as Facebook’s blatant attempt to control speech), I decided that I am simply not going to participate in that circus.   I still maintain a Twitter account, but given the purge, Twitter may be gone soon as well.

This is only the beginning.  As the Woke Left ratchets up its suppression, I will ratchet up my resistance accordingly. 

Game on.

Questions

 

I have questions.

The two main reasons conspiracy theories are running rampant is that (i)  journalism died, and (ii) Critical Theory has gained a foothold, which emphasizes “my truth” instead of “the truth,” and the two reinforce each other so that probing questions do not get asked or get brushed aside.

So, here are some of my questions, and if anyone has a plausible explanation, I’m all ears. 

-The FISA Court clearly failed by permitting unverified material to be used to surveil the Trump administration.  The FISA Court is a special ex parte court which allows certain procedures to proceed without being contested and a departure from our adversary system, and it broke down in this case.  Why haven’t the people who did this been held accountable and why hasn’t Chief Justice John Roberts (who oversees the FISA Court) spoken up about this breakdown and what he intends to do about it?

-The MSM keeps repeating the refrain “no evidence of massive fraud” as if it were saying vespers.  Why were windows blocked to obstruct views in Michigan?  Why did we have more votes than registered voters in Pennsylvania?  Why were ballots rolled out in suitcases from under tables?  Why did 6 states all stop counting ballots simultaneously on election night?  No alternative explanation for any of these behaviors has been offered.

-Joe Biden stated that his party conducted massive voter fraud operation.   The MSM shrugged it off.  Why did he say that?

-Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, just announced a crackdown on Antifa.   Why now?  Why the sudden epiphany?  His enlightenment on the road to Damascus occurred in the same week Nancy Pelosi’s and Mitch McConnell’s homes were vandalized by Antifa.  Is there any connection?  And by the way, why is there no footage from the security cameras available at their respective homes.

-Why did the mayor of Moscow’s wife wire $3.5 million to Hunter Biden?  What was that payment for?  The Biden family also received a $5 million “loan” from China.  Was that repaid?   Where did the money go?

-Black Lives Matter raised over $1 billion, receiving funds from Bank of America, the N.F.L., Unilever, Nike, AirBnb and on and on.  Where did all the money go?  Can you name a single significant project or achievement so far?  An education center?  Scholarships?  Funding for HBCU’s?  Health care centers?  Entrepreneurship programs?  Anything?   A building?  Child care?   Most often, charities do a very specific proposal and corporations engage in a long due diligence process, often lasting over a year or more before wiring money to a charity.  Did any of these companies do this?

-Back to poor old George Floyd.  I am still troubled by the events surrounding his “death.”  I have been through first aid training and one of the basic tasks that a first responder must do before attempting to move a victim is to check his pulse and check to see if he’s breathing.  The responders did not do that in this case.  In addition, the officer knelt on his neck for 9 minutes, putting pressure on the cervical area of his neck.  With a possible neck injury, a first responder would NEVER move someone in the way that they moved George.   Without taking his pulse, without seeing if he was breathing, and with a possible neck injury, they schlepped him on the gurney like a sack of potatoes, and whisked him away.   Why didn’t his family sue for this prima facie malpractice handling of him?  Further, these were not EMT’s that popped out of the ambulance.  They were armed men, and at least one of them was wearing a Kevlar vest.   That’s not who is usually dispatched with an ambulance.

-Then there is the Nashville bombing.  Within 48 hours, the FBI declared that they had identified the perpetrator and announced that he was a “lone wolf” and also said that he was not on their radar screen.   How does the FBI come to this conclusion so quickly?  How did they go through his cell phone contacts, his texts and emails, interview all of these people, his neighbors, co-workers, neighbors, etc., all in 48 hours to make that determination.

-How can Eric Swalwell still be on the House Intelligence Committee?  Same with Ilhan Omar. How can it possibly be justified?

-An African American man was shot and killed by a police officer in Minneapolis the other day (which was being carped about by Ilhan Omar) in an exchange of gunfire.  Yet, there were not riots.  Is the African American community now able to distinguish this shooting from the Jacob Blake shooting or the Rayshard Brooks shooting or is something else going on here?  Why did Minneapolis not go up in flames this time around?

I’m no devotee of Alex Jones.   Or conspiracy theories.  But I am a devotee of matching numbers to narratives, to tracking cash flow and common sense answers to straightforward questions.  I welcome answers to any or all of those that I have posed.

2020 - It's a Wrap

 

2020 was such an unusual year, unlike any other in most of our lives.  So unusual that it was hard to tell fact from fiction, reality from illusion.   It was a year in which the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory guys like Alex Jones often turned out to be more credible than CBS.  We were locked down, our cities were ravaged by riots, and our civil liberties kicked to the curb.  Our children were locked out of school.  Our friendships and relationships got reshuffled.  We were barred from movie theaters, sporting events and live music.   Many of us have developed serious questions about the sustainability of our Republic and Western Civilization generally.

Nonetheless, I’m putting together my annual “Best Of” lists, which will have a particular flavor and perspective because of the time that we find ourselves in.  Here are my recommendations and my favorites from 2020- A Year Gone Mad.

Film
Despite the lockdown and paucity of mainstream films, some outlets like siskelfilmcenter.org were able to pivot quickly to streaming and fill the gap.  It is certainly not the same as the theater (just as Zoom is not the same as an in person meeting), but there were still some high quality films that were (and are available).   Here are the top three that I liked:

Mr. Jones
If you see only one film this year, this should be it.  Thirty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.   Many of the people that escaped Stalin’s terrors have passed on, too.   An entire generation is removed from the gulags, the killings, and the starvation.  As time has passed, the stories of the horrors have faded.  In this time of worries over a tyrannical government and an obsequious press,  this film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland brings it all back.   It is the story of Garth Jones, a Welsh journalist, that sneaks out to the countryside and uncovers the truth about the intentional starvation of the Ukrainians, while other colleagues are plied with alcohol and prostitutes to keep them from reporting on this man-made humanitarian disaster.   Not only does this film resonate because of current events, it struck a chord with me personally as some of the parents of friends of mine actually lived through this.   Do not miss this film.  It will make you see things differently as current events unfold and remind you that the corruption of the media is not new.

The Cuban
The Cuban is heartwarming story of a dementia afflicted musician whose humanity is brought back to him by a daring young caretaker that discards the institutional food and brings him authentic Cuban cuisine and brings him Afro-Cuban music.  The soundtrack is wonderful as is the story of rebellion against the nursing home.   The film was criticized for being a bit maudlin.  Fair enough.  But if ever there was a time that we needed a film about restoring a person’s life and humanity, it’s now. 

Sweat
Sweat is a Polish film that won best film at the Chicago International Film Festival.  It is a Polish-Swedish film about a social media fitness star that picks up a stalker.  Like The Cuban, it explores the humanity of Sylvia (Magdalena Kolesnik) and the depth of the loneliness under her celebrity status—a kind of up to date, healthy drug-free Janis Joplin.   I loved the depiction of her extended Polish family, which I thought to be authentic.   Kolesnik has a great screen presence and is one of two young Polish actresses (Zofia Wichlacz- World on Fire below) that had outstanding performances.

Books

Nonfiction

My favorite book of the year was Erik Larsen’s The Splendid and the Vile, a detailed and well-written account of Winston Churchill’s first year in office.   The book provided lots of interesting nuggets about the Churchill family, Churchill himself and his numerous quirks and what day to day life was like during the Blitz.   Reading this book during lockdown was most meaningful because, like the Battle of Britain, you know that some people are going to die, the resolution is uncertain and you don’t know how long it will last. 

Given the political turbulence, riots, lockdown and a stolen election, along with the press of Wokeism, I turned to other writers to make sense of it all.  My favorite in this regard was Live Not By Lies: A Manuel for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher, but I also liked The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity,  by Douglas Murray and Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity and How this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.  These books offer strong defenses of Western Civilization and Enlightenment thought generally and critique globalism, Critical Theory and the poison of Postmodernism. 

One of my favorite quotes is from Rod Dreher, who sums up postmodernism quite well:

Christians today must understand that, fundamentally,  they are not resisting a different politics, but rather what is effectively a rival religion.

Fiction

In fiction, I try to tackle a “project” every year.  Last year, I successfully did Moby-Dick for the Newberry Library 26 hour Moby-Dick read-a-thon.  Brimming with confidence over that achievement, I tried Middlemarch and got bogged down like Napoleon in the Russian winter about 2/3 of the way through.

Nonetheless, there were some winning novels this year.  The translation of Abigail by Hungarian writer Magda Szabo came out this year and this coming of age story of an adolescent girl during WWII was outstanding.   I liked it even better than her other acclaimed novel, The Door.   Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space came in at number 2.  This novel about the complexities of a long term marriage, and the fight against aging was yet another excellent work by Shriver.  Finally, My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell was an uncomfortable, yet interesting novel about an affair between a boarding school teacher and a 15 year old student.  I reviewed this novel last spring (https://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2020/04/my-dark-vanessa.html)  and I think Russell is an interesting young writer and I expect good things from her in the future.   It's probably no accident that two of my three top novels involve adolescent girls struggling through very trying and confusing circumstances.  I think they resonated with me because I am deeply concerned about the effect that lockdown and pandemic and resulting isolation and interruption in their educational and social development that is being inflicted upon them.   These two novels remind us that adolescents are complex people too, and whatever insecurities we, as adults, are feeling about all this is magnified in them.

Television

World on Fire

I confess that I do not have much to evaluate on television.  I did not see the acclaimed miniseries Queen’s Gambit (which I plan to binge watch soon).  Like the book, The Splendid and the Vile, I ended up being riveted to stories about WWII, another time that lives were upended in a chaotic, unpredictable way.   World on Fire by PBS captivated me.   I thought Helen Hunt’s performance was spectacular and I was taken by the performance of young actress Zofia Wichlacz.   More generally, Season 1 focused a lot on the invasion of Poland and Polish resistance.  I liked the fact that Masterpiece used Polish actors and it added to its authenticity.  I highly recommend World on Fire if you haven’t yet caught up.

In a most unusual year, there were some sparkling gems in film, books and TV.   While we were locked out of theaters and music venues, there were still some artistic productions that salvaged a pretty awful year and made some of lockdown a bit more tolerable.

No Consequences/No Accountability

 

I wish I had tidings of great joy this holiday season.   I really do.  Instead, I have a warning.   Hold close to the people around you.  Prepare, mostly by preparing yourself for the dark and treacherous days that lie ahead.  We have entered a period no less turbulent than WWII.   I mentioned to someone the other day that reading Eric Larsen’s book on Churchill’s first year in office and the Battle of Britain gave me a sense of what it was like during those dark, uncertain years.  We are going through something quite analogous.  It will be as difficult a challenge as the Blitz.  Like Great Britain, we will stand mostly alone (perhaps the Visegrad nations will be with us).   Great Britain was bombed from above.  Our foes have already penetrated the interior.  

I have argued that 9/11 exposed the weakness in our defense structure.  A handful of barbarians with limited technology was able to inflict a devastating blow to our nation, and hit us in the heart of our financial center and defense center.  Without the heroic acts of the passengers on Flight 93, our capitol would have like been destroyed.    The real estate crisis of ’07 and ’08 exposed the fragility of our financial system.  The real estate frenzy and the push to make loans to noncreditworthy borrowers resulted in a panic and deep and long recession.  2020 with COVID19 and the riots exposed our social and moral decrepitude.  

No consequences/No accountability

I wrote earlier this year that we have undergone what I called a “criminal inversion,’ as we lionized criminals George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, honored Floyd with multiple funerals and yet when a true American hero, Neil Armstrong passed, there was little fanfare.

Rioters and Looters.

Very few of the rioters and looter  were even arrested.  Of the ones that were, most were sprung from jail almost immediately, and activist funds posted the bail for many others.  Unbeknownst to most people, the bail posted by activist funds revert to the perpetrator.  The rioters and looters actually kept the money.  So, not only were there no consequences for the rioters and looters, many were actually subsidized.

Worse, the attacks of many rioters and looters justified the use of deadly force against them.  Rioters in Portland, Chicago, and other locales threw bricks, frozen water bottles, threw incendiary devices and pointed blinding lasers in the eyes of law enforcement officers.  Very few of these perpetrators were even arrested.  Closer to home, a “defund the police” protest escalated at Northwestern University, students broke windows and vandalized stores in Evanston and threw bricks at police – an act that justifies deadly force.  President Morton Shapiro’s response?   Writing a public letter of rebuke expressing “disappointment” in the students.   Again, no real consequences for potentially deadly assaults.

Most astonishingly, there have been no consequences for the political class whatsoever.

New York mayor Bill DeBlasio’s wife Chirlane McCray was entrusted with overseeing ThriveNYC, an initiative that was to funded to fight drug abuse, homelessness and depression.  Last I  noticed, there was plenty of that going around in New York.  But $850 million is missing and unaccounted for.   There have been no consequences and no accountability for her.  The MSM has lost interest in the scandal.

The wife of Bernie Sanders, Jane, was being investigated for bank fraud.  As president of Burlington College, she fraudulently misrepresented pledges the college was to receive in order to receive a loan.  The college ultimately went bankrupt. Defrauding a bank by misrepresenting collateral is a serious offense, yet the matter was quietly dropped.

In an earlier era, Eric Swalwell would have been summarily hanged for treason.  His tryst with Chinese fundraiser and spy revealed, Swalwell has since gone on the offense, demanding to know who leaked this information and incredulously asserting that he can’t comment on any of this because it is “classified.”  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vigorously defends Swalwell and refuses to take him off the House Intelligence Committee.

Another august member of the Intelligence Committee is Ilhan Omar.   The Marxist Somali routinely makes anti-Semitic remarks and bellows for the defunding of police.  Yet, she has funded herself pretty well, egregiously violating conflict of interest rules by steering campaign funds to her former lover and now husband.   After calls for censure for her anti-Semitic remarks, Pelosi introduced a watered down version that essentially said that any bigotry should be frowned upon.  Omar still sits on the committee and has been re-elected.  Her purported immigration fraud likewise has been kicked to the curb.

And then there is Hunter Biden.  Hunter belongs in his own special category.   I won’t repeat all that has been written about Hunter (and then covered up and censored by the media—Russian disinformation, you know), but here’s a guy so brazen that he fought paying child support to the pole dancer that he impregnated.  There has been no explanation as to why

Andrew Cuomo.  After dispatching 6,300 COVID19 infected people into nursing homes that resulting in thousands of deaths, Cuomo received an Emmy and then had the chutzpah to write a book on his own leadership capabilities.  In any other venue, deaths resulting from a mistake in judgment of this magnitude would result in disgrace, removal and exile, if not worse.  But undeterred, Cuomo continues on to his next project.  Having presided over the deaths of thousands of individuals, he is shutting down the restaurant business in New York and presiding over the deaths of thousands of businesses.

9/11 exposed our defense shortfalls.  The Great Recession showed our financial fragility.  COVID and the riots exposed our social and moral decline.  We have entire criminal and political classes that now have a veritable force field around them and are impervious to the consequences of their horrendous acts.  In each of these cases, the members are of a protected class that suffer no ill effects whatsoever for the damage they have wrought.

The Future is Female (but maybe not how you think)

 

The Future is Female is another progressive slogan that has been around for a bit.  But like “The Great Reset,” that I wrote about last week, I believe that it is partially true, but not quite as the progressive movement had in mind.

While it appears that conservatives, libertarians and Constitutionalists seem to be outnumbered and surrounded by the media (both mainstream and social), academia and the Democratic party, I’m finding that the staunchest defenders of liberalism (of the traditional type) and sanity are women.  In fact, while much of the establishment GOP has wilted in the face of the onslaught, the unflinching and fiercest defenders of Western liberalism are female.   So this week, I am putting forward some of the “momma bears” or, as I call them, the Ladies of Liberty or the Fraus and Frauleins of Freedom.   This list is not meant to be all inclusive (oh, how I have come to hate that word), but a sampling of women that you should consider following.  

Politics:

Step aside,  Nikki Haley.  Your several stumbles that belied your pandering instincts, including your rush to judgment on the “noose” that turned out to be a garage pull in Bubba Wallace’s garage.  But here are 3 women in political life worth following:

Kristi Noem
Yes, Kristi is carefully cultivating an image of herself on social media, showing photos of herself hunting, hiking and horseback riding, but Noem has shown herself to be a steady hand and a solid leader during the COVID crisis.  Unlike blue states like Illinois, she has put South Dakota on a sound  financial footing and, in fact, is adding to its financial reserves.  She has managed the response to COVID in a sane and sober way.  She has shown herself to be devoted to the Constitution and to the concept of  limited government. Look for Noem to become a higher profile player in the future.

Kim Klasic
OK, I admit, Klasic’s beauty knocks me over.   Her fearless ad campaign in her congressional bid took the world by storm, calling out the failed Democratic leadership for the mess they created in Baltimore.  She understands that the old, progressive approach will never work to revitalize a city like Baltimore.  Klasic has real charisma and courage, and I see her as a real rising conservative star.

Tulsi Gabbard
Yes, Tulsi’s economic policies are not to my liking.  But she single handed disassembled Kamala Harris during the primaries, and voted “present” on impeachment.  And now has sponsored a bill to protect women’s sports by limiting participation in girl’s and women’s sports to biological women, defying the radical elements of the LGBTQ community and the official position of her own party.  Gabbard, I believe, can be a key ally in the defense of Western ideals, and often shows signs of sensibility, a trait mostly absent in today’s Corbynized Democratic party.

Of course, many other women only have a presence on social media—they have or would be marginalized in mainstream media or academia, but here are the women I follow:

Heather Heying (@HeatherEHeying)
A self described left of center scientist, Heying and her husband run a weekly podcast called Dark Horse, much of which is aimed at the highly unscientific, disingenuous and illiberal scientific and academic world that has bathed itself in critical theory. Heying is simply a brilliant woman and an unwavering defender of the principles of the Enlightenment, free inquiry and the scientific method.

Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy)
This is her nom de plume, and a recent follow of mine.  She is a contributing editor at The American Mind, a Catholic and self described survivor of an Ivy League education.  She is a very talented writer and some of her material rivals that of Lionel Shriver.  She is a no nonsense woman with an added plus of a great wit and a great sense of humor.  Her essays are a joy to read.

Tara Ross (@TaraRoss)
Ms. Ross is a student of American history, and puts out a daily “This Day in American History” blast.  She is loath to jump into politics but she has seen the power grab by mayors and governors that abuse our civil rights and Constitutional rights and norms.  She is one of the fiercest defenders of individual liberty and the Electoral College in public life.   Our education system needs a lot more Tara Ross and a lot less Nikole Hanna-Jones (author of the 1619 Project).

Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO)
Like Kim Klacik, Owns is another young, fearless conservative black voice.  She is poised and well schooled, presents well and is willing to push back against Black Lives Matter and the Democratic party.   She rejects victimhood status and recently published Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democratic Plantation.  She has had a few stumbles (her comment on Hitler was misplaced) but I see Owens as a bright advocate for conservatism.

Claire Lehmann (@clairlemom)
Claire is the founding managing editor of Quilette, a platform for free thought and free expression.  It is a direct challenge to the cancel culture, and a place to obtain a variety of divergent views.  The Quilette podcasts are very good and range from Abigail Shrier on the epidemic of teen girls seeking gender reassignment, to author Lionel Shriver on the illogic of lockdowns to Jodi Shaw on the unfounded charges of racism at Smith College.

Tina Forte (@RealTina40)
Tough, foul mouthed, no holds barred, Tina is a real Bronx girl, hammering DeBlasio and Coumo mercilessly for the needless destruction of businesses, lives and the great city of New York.   One poster commented to her, ”Every time you post, I duck.” In blunt language, she holds these politicians accountable for the havoc they have caused in a once great city.

(https://twitter.com/RealTina40/status/1338865324645441543?s=20)

I also like Samantha Marika (@samanthamarika1), a young, black female conservative that does wonderful, thought provoking video pieces and author Ava Armstrong (@MsAvaArmstrong), who also consistently puts out accurate and searing tweets.

In addition to the above, there are several women overseas that I really like:  Miss Brittania (@sanefeminist), an author from Scotland,  Catholic an unapologetic advocate of nationalism, opponent of critical theory, and defender of Western Civilization; Stare Decisis (@MsResJudicata), an attorney with a strong background in economics, and Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick), an Israeli author and speaker.

These women often have divergent views, with some even tilting left, like Gabbard and Heying.  But that is the point.  Diversity of views is something the new radical left cannot tolerate.  What these women have in common is the courage of their convictions, their authenticity, and their willingness to stand against Wokeism.  I encourage you to follow all of them, and enjoy them, because Big Tech will certainly deplatform some of them.

Shifting Alliances

 

If it seems that the ground is shifting underneath you, it’s because it is.  We are going through multiple paradigm shifts simultaneously and it’s happening so fast that we can hardly catch our breath.  Alliances also are being torn apart and reformed at mind numbing speed, both here and abroad.

Alliance of Democratic Party with Islamism. 
Something like 80-85% of American Jews reliably vote Democratic year in and year out.  But astonishingly, Jews are being abandoned and scorned by Democrats.  The elevation of the stature of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib on a national level is simply stunning.  Democrats couldn’t even bring themselves to condemn Omar’s blatant anti-semitism and Tlaib is now grotesquely on a panel on anti-semitism yet recently retweeted her “from the river to the sea” comment, implying the destruction of Israel.  Democratic New York mayor Bill DeBlasio has targeted Orthodox Jews, their families and businesses for violating COVID rules, obviously singling them out for punishment.  I often wonder how long it will take for many American Jews to realize that they are not in the club anymore?

One must wonder how deeply Islamism has seeped into the American bureaucracy.   In the Obama administration, Obama inexplicably made outreach by NASA a high priority.  And more recently, the CDC in its Thanksgiving recommendations said that we should wear a mask (face veil), and refrain from singing and alcohol use. Sounds suspiciously Taliban-y to me.

The Vatican and the Globalist Left
What more can I say about Pope Francis?  Forty years ago, we had a pope that played a leading role in the fall of the Soviet Union and the discreditation of Communism.  Francis has done an about face and has embraced globalism, and has been harshly critical of the “ideology of individualism” while standing mute against the environmental and human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party.  Early in his tenure, I called attention to Francis’s tendency to use the exact same language as Hugo Chavez.   He has since shifted to adopt the slogans and phrases of the globalist left and explicitly used the “build back better” slogan.  He seems less concerned with saving souls than he does parroting the messages of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg.

Catholics and Jews
Faithful Catholics and Jews, finding their rights to worship abrogated by bullying mayors are closing ranks.   I proposed a National Conference of Vigano Catholics and Religious Jews.  Both are held in contempt by New York major DeBlasio, and both united to take their case for opening houses of worship to the Supreme Court.  As progressives continue to use COVID as a pretext for stomping on religious liberty, I predict a closer bond between Catholics and Jews.

Gulf States and Israel
Just as Catholics and Jews have formed tighter bonds, Gulf States and Israel are making peace.  Contrary to the assertions of John Kerry, peace between the Arab states and Israel is being forged without a Palestinian state (see Jake Novak’s latest periscope{ (https://twitter.com/jakejakeny/status/1335619906704969729?s=20)

And at the same time, the U.S. is drawing down troops in the Middle East.  This is a wonderful development, due in no small part to the continued pressure placed on the Iranian regime by Donald Trump.

Blacks and Republicans

Yes, progressives seem to be running the table right now.  Smug and confident, and one stolen election away from controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency, they are poised to make radical changes to our society.  Yet, at some level, they must be terrified.  The Democratic party is in danger of driving Jewish voters away and now black voters are starting to leak out.  Trump did reasonably well with black voters and a new cadre of conservative black voices has started to bubble up.  Burgess Owens, Kim Klacik, Candace Owens and comedian Terrance Williams have surfaced as leading black conservative blacks.  It doesn’t yet look like a mass exodus from the Democratic party, but these fresh black voices could start to chip away at Democratic dominance among African Americans.

Much is being said about the Great Reset.  Certainly, a number of traditional alliances are shifting and the Great Reset may not turn out quite like progressives expect.