Another Institution Falls to CRT

 I am stunned at the speed with which Wokeism has taken control of many of our institutions.   On the national level, it has inserted itself into the N.B.A., MLB, and the N.F.L.  Many major corporations have allowed it to infect its operating system—Bank of America, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, Gillette, to name a few. 

But locally, too, the movement has swept through our not-for-profits and educational institutions like wildfire.   The new American Writer’s Museum went from a special exhibit featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder and a live performance of readers of Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to featuring an obscure transgender author alongside Kathy Griffin in just a few months.  The Newberry Library went from a celebration of Herman Melville to sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour and launching a vigorous campaign to rid the city of Columbus Day.  The University of Chicago, the originator of its laudable Free Speech Principles, shut down admissions to its graduate English Department to all but Black Studies scholars. 

Most troubling is the grip it is now asserting over our primary and secondary school system, threatening to indoctrinate young minds with its pernicious creed.  James Lindsay has brought to light its overt strategy, comparing it to a virus that hijacks its system to self-replicate.  In The Parasitic Mind, author Gad Saad similarly asserts that Wokeness and CRT acts as a parasite, infecting its host and sucking the life out of it.  

And now it has infected the local Jesuit High School, Loyola Academy.   Imagine the horror and revulsion of the caring, devout Catholic parents that sacrifice to scrape up the $16,000 per year to ensure that their son or daughter receives an education aimed at forming the whole person as a responsible, family and community oriented citizen, only to wake up and find that he or she is being shamed for the color of their skin and subjected to a large BLM sign (whose stated objectives are the destruction of the nuclear family) now proudly displayed in the school.   A large group of parents, dismayed and angry, has formed an opposition group to oppose the teaching of CRT in the school, has put up a website and is organizing a campaign to attempt to put a stop to it. 

While I share their dismay and anger and I am very sympathetic to their cause, the parent group  faces an uphill battle to expunge CRT from the school.   The Loyola administration has turned itself into a hardened target.  The parents opposing CRT are trying to persuade the administration to hearing them out—they are playing the Persuasion Game.  The school’s administration has already foreclosed that—it is now playing the Power Game,  not the Persuasion Game.     It is not persuadable.

In order to stand any chance of successfully dislodging the poison of CRT, the parent group will need to decide how close to the Buzzsaw they wish to get (See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Dark Horse Podcast #82 5/29/21 – Avoiding the Buzzsaw)—being maligned as “racists,”  otherwise smeared in social media or canceled.   The propagators of CRT know this.  Parents do not want to put their kids in the crosshairs of controversy during their high school years.

To start with, they will need to do two things: recognize and acknowledge that outgoing Father McGrath was a terrible steward of the school, and they must be willing to litigate.

McGrath cannot be seen as a reasonable or positive actor in this drama.  His primary job as leader of this institution is to educate and train young men and women to become critical thinkers, to lead a Christian life as “men and women for others,” to foster a “Loyola community” and to be cognizant of, and prepare against, the threats that institutions like Loyola will face in the future.

McGrath has failed miserably in his most essential tasks.  Under his aegis, the school has been torn apart.  There is no Loyola community anymore. 

By permitting CRT to take root in the school, McGrath allowing intellectual and emotional abuse of these young men and women.  This is substantively no different than the sexual abuse that was endemic in Catholic institutions and he is responding in the same fashion—stonewalling and setting up impenetrable defenses.

McGrath has manipulated the board of trustees, shrunk it to rid itself of dissenters (apparently using some “emergency” bylaw provision.  He has engaged PR firms to deal with this.   The sympathetic column written by Clarence Page was clearly arranged, with Page declaring it a “tempest in a teapot.”  It is not that.  It is a fundamental battle over whether Loyola students are going to be intellectually abused.  McGrath’s quote in Clarence Page’s column is revealing, stating that he seeks critical thinking about race.  CRT does NOT welcome critical thinking about race.  It does not tolerate dissent from its views.  Already, other Woke parents are labelling those that oppose CRT as “racist.”  No apology for this has been forthcoming from those parents or McGrath.

McGrath correctly identifies racism is a sin.  But McGrath does not offer any evidence at all that racism has been an issue at the school.  Specific incidents of racism should be dealt with on an individual basis, just as Rocky Wirtz, president of the Blackhawks did when 2 fans made racist comments at a black player.  They were summarily removed and permanently banished from the United Center.   Loyola, it appears, is and has been a very welcoming place, a place where black, Hispanic, Asian and white kids can all thrive. 

I would advise the parent group to watch the film Spotlight to see what they’re up against with respect to the Catholic Establishment.  In that case, it was the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.  Here, it is emotional and intellectual abuse that McGrath is welcoming into the school.  In addition to the documented “white shaming” that he has permitted to go on, he has permitted a large Black Lives Matter banner to be prominently displayed in the school.  In addition to be led by avowed Marxists, BLM is anti-law enforcement (“What do we want? Dead cops.  When do we want it? Now.”),  antisemitic, and its mission is explicitly anti-family and has no inhibitions of using violence to achieve its ends.  It belongs nowhere near an educational institution, much less a Catholic one.  Moreover, he ignores its real aims—to displace a free and liberal society borne out of the Enlightenment with a Marxist one.  McGrath has demonstrated that he has not followed Ibraham Kendi very closely, nor has he become acquainted with the writings of CRT’s progenitors—Michel Foucoult, Antonio Gramsci, or Herbert Marcuse. 

Further, McGrath fails to understand that Wokeism and CRT are antithetical to Catholicism.  Intellectual leaders such as Douglas Murray, Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter and others have correctly identified it as a new religion, complete with its own scripture and clergy.   It is a religion that will compete with Catholicism.  By embracing CRT, Loyola is no longer a Catholic school.   It is a Woke school.  Over time, they cannot coexist.  The Kairos retreats, which dealt with the development of the individual and spiritual growth will now focus on race—and the oppressed and the oppressors. 

McGrath (and the board of trustees) needs to be called out for what he is and what he has done to this once fine school.

What to do?   I don’t have a dog in this fight.  My children are long gone.  My interest only is in pushing back against this insidious intellectual abuse of children.

I know what won’t work.

Withholding donations won’t matter much.  While Mr. Purcell’s loud withdrawal of support is laudable, organizations that have been taken over by Woke and CRT have shown that they really don’t care as long as they can hijack the organization for their purposes.  Even if half the funds dried up, and Loyola reduced its enrollment by half, the CRT crowd consider it a victory—a North Shore school pumping out Woke teens. 

Letter writing won’t work.  One writes to persuade and this administration is well beyond that.

The only path to satisfaction---and there is only one that I see—is through litigation, carefully orchestrated with a skilled PR firm.  This administration will do nothing until costs are imposed on it.   I have identified at least four potential claims that could be made against the school and there may be more.   The litigation needs to be coordinated with a PR firm.   McGrath has apparently employed one.  The parents need one to even the playing field.  The parent group has done a good job of documenting the abuse on their website (kidswinloyola.com) but they will continue to get stiff armed and outflanked by an administration that is determined to shut them out, and treat them with contempt.

The parent group should take a cue from one of the New Jersey girls that lost in the state finals to a transgender athlete.  She is suing, making it very public and has launched a very public campaign on social media to promote her cause.  A girl is Oklahoma likewise has filed claims because she was dropped from her volleyball team because of her political beliefs.  And we all know that Nick Sandman of Covington would have languished after being demonized by the media until he filed claims against the media giants. 

In addition to filing claims and engaging in a public PR battle, they should demand access to classrooms, especially those classes of teachers that they know are teaching and promoting CRT.  Knowing they are being policed may help curtail the indoctrination.

The Catholic Establishment knows how to defeat dissent and deflect charges of abuse.   It is very skilled and has a great deal of resources at its disposal.  The parents group will need to re-think its strategy if it does not wish to be ground down.

Another institution has fallen.  If it can be restored at all, it will take a tough, bruising, and expensive fight to restore it.

 

Who are the Fascists?

 

Much of the criticism of the Woke movement and Critical Race Theory centers around their Marxist underpinnings.   And while that is certainly true, I believe it is an incomplete view.  As we begin to observe more of Wokeism and how it behaves, I am coming to the realization that the movement is more of a hybrid between Communism and Nazism.   It has as many characteristics of Nazism as it does Maoism or Bolshevism.

Luke Holland’s documentary, Final Account opened last weekend and provoked questions in my mind about the similarities between National Socialism and Wokeness.  Holland interviewed elderly Germans that had some role in the Third Reich.  The film opens with camp survivor Primo Levi’s quote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.  More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” 

I have long been fascinated by the question of how an otherwise civilized nation could find itself in the grips of such a totalitarian, toxic regime.   Holland’s film helped me fill in some of the gaps.  Some of the interviewees denied that they knew exactly what was going on.  Some admitted their complicity.  Some were swept up in the collective fervor, the camaraderie of summer camps and such.  Some exhibited no guilt at all.  One unashamedly and flatly said, “I don’t blame Hitler.”   I was struck by the lack of emotion of many of the interviewees, confirming in my mind Hannah Arendt’s claim of the banality of evil.  Probably the most interesting was Hans Werk, who, in a roundtable with younger Germans implores them, “don’t let yourself be blinded.”

The film delves into the normalization of Jew hatred—the inculcation of antisemitism in schools and the gradual exclusion of Jews from economic and social life in Germany.   In several scenes depicting photographs, signs can be seen in the background with the admonition, “Jews Not Welcome Here.”  The normalization of Jew hatred in Germany began at an early age with nursery rhymes talking about “sharpening the knife to stick in the Jew’s belly.”

Final Account gave me some insight into how ordinary people signed on to the heinous Nazi ideology.  Coupled with reading Richard Evans’s voluminous three volume history of the Third Reich,  I am arriving at some insights into the Woke movement as it spreads its tentacles across the United States.   As I contemplate the evolution of  Wokeness, and in particular, the Critical Race Theory aspect of it, it is clear to me that it is borrowing as much from the Third Reich as it does from the Communist revolutions in Russia and China.

First, Wokeness has its own brownshirts.  In fact, it has three branches—Antifa, BLM and pro-Palestinian thugs.   Each has evidenced no inhibitions about harassing, hurting, and even killing people.   Antifa is still laying siege to Portland with very limited response from the authorities.  BLM harasses and assaults people in restaurants. loots, throws bricks and frozen water bottles at cops and their chants express a desire to do much more.  We saw pro-Palestinian mobs harass and assaulting Jews out in the open last week.   Last week, a mob of BLM supporters closed down a block of retail stores because they were open and “disrespecting Malcolm X’s birthday.”

Second is the indoctrination of its ideology through the school systems. In many states, including Illinois, CRT is now mandated.  And it is happening at all levels of the education system, including higher ed.  This parallels the indoctrination of national socialism in schools and camps throughout Germany.

“The dumbing-down of university education and professional training, with its emphasis on ideological indoctrination and military preparedness rather than on the traditional acquisition of knowledge and skills, added to this regimentation of professional activities to produce a palpable demoralization amongst many professionals.”

-R. Evans, The Third Reich in Power p.444

And again,

“Thus state and Party were both undermining the socializing and educating functions of the family.  Baldur von Shirach [head of Hitler Youth] was aware of this criticism and sought to counter it with the allegation that many poor and working-class children did not have a proper family life anyway.”

-R. Evans, The Third Reich in Power p. 279

We are seeing CRT indoctrination implemented as early as kindergarten, all the way through higher education, without any questioning whether or not it is even a discipline worthy of study.  My own alma mater, The University of Chicago is now contemplating gracing it with an entire department.  And the dumbing-down is rampant.  As I write this, Princeton has announced that it will eliminate Greek or Latin requirements for Classics majors in pursuit of “inclusiveness.”

Third, and most pernicious, is the normalization antisemitism that is embedded within Wokeness and CRT.  About 4 or 5 years ago, I guest lectured at a business class at the University of Illinois-Chicago. While I was waiting, I spied on a bulletin board that had a flyer posted on it, out in the open, that stated conspicuously and in bold letters, “White Privilege Starts with Jewish Privilege.”   I removed the flyer, snapped a photo of it to document it, and, horrified, crumpled it and threw it in the trash.  I felt like I was in 1930’s Germany.

That flyer was my first clue to where this was all headed.  We see signs of it everywhere.  From the treatment of Orthodox Jews by DeBlasio in New York during the pandemic, and attacks on Jews by street thugs, to the open antisemitism of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib in Congress (which Democratic leaders refuse to condemn) to the open physical attacks on Jews after the missile attacks on Israel by Hamas.  

The hatred, resentment and intolerance fostered by the Woke movement is broader than Jews, but they are at the epicenter.  That flyer told you what the Woke movement is thinking.

Finally, there is the rank corruption within the movement, from entitled politicians to the leaders of BLM,

“Aryanization was only one part of a vast and rapidly growing system of plunder, expropriation and embezzlement under the Third Reich.”

-R. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 400

Replace “Aryanization” with “Black Lives Matter” and the sudden real estate holdings of Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors immediately jumps to mind.  So do the recipients of the “reparations” in Evanston, and the government largesse bestowed on black farmers and citizens of Oakland, as well as the six figure salaried “diversity officers” and “consultants,”  preaching CRT within various school systems.  Black Lives Matter received hundreds of millions of dollars in donations in the wake of George Floyd’s death,  yet there isn’t a single program, institution, building, or the like that anyone can identify that the organization sponsored or built that actually improved the lives of black people.  The Illinois Senate just passed a Black Wall Street measure, aimed at providing loans and other financial assistance to black owned businesses in majority black communities.  Whites and Asians are not eligible.

To be sure, the parallels with National Socialism are not identical.  The Wokeness movement is not nationalistic, but rather international in scope.  It has yet to fully militarize (although the erection of razor wire and deployment of the national guard at the Capitol were disquieting).   It does not yet have a single, charismatic leader, but rather a cadre of high priests and priestesses.  Yet, Wokeness and Critical Race Theory share more than a few similarities with Germany’s National Socialist movement, and I am beginning to see Wokeness as a hybrid of Communism and Nazism.  Many Republicans claim to be “fiscally conservative,” yet “socially liberal.”   Perhaps the adherents to Wokeism are most appropriately described as “fiscally Marxist,” yet “socially Nazi.”

Conspiracy Theories

 The recent exchange between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci was instructive, and gave us insight into the origins of COVID19.   As Senator Paul began to probe Fauci’s role in funding the Wuhan Laboratory and the hypothesis that the NIH, directed by Fauci, had been funding “gain of function” coronavirus research at that lab.  Fauci, of course, got touchy and vehemently denied his involvement.  When the former director,  Robert Redfield, opined that COVID19 likely originated in the Wuhan Lab, Fauci, with no mention of evidence, summarily dismissed him.  “That’s his opinion,” he stated, as if Redfield were just a layperson at the end of the bar.    When Tucker Carlson challenged Fauci over the effectiveness of vaccines, Fauci responded by writing it off as “conspiracy theories.”

Early in the outbreak, evolutionary biologists Bret Weinsten and Heather Heying raised the hypothesis that COVID19 had escaped from the lab and were immediately savaged by the press as “conspiracy theorists,” and “right wingers,” and “loons.”

“Conspiracy theorist” has now become the reflexive charge flung at someone that proposes a plausible alternative hypothesis.  Its use has become especially prevalent when a skeptic is on to something, when someone has either distorted or actively hidden relevant facts and data that are contrary to an espoused narrative.   Like its sister term, “racist” or “systemic racism,” it is employed to stop the discussion and stop further inquiry.   In 4^th grade schoolyard terms, it’s telling you to “just shut up.”

But in addition to the COVID19 outbreak, over the past year, we have had several events that defy the government and media narrative about them.

The Capitol Insurrection and the death of officer Sicknick

The Capitol “Insurrection” on January 6 has been used to justify fortifying the Capitol with national guard troops and encase it in barbed wire, hold protesters in solitary confinement for months when their actual only offense was trespassing, hiring outside firms and the USPS to spy on social media accounts, and halt military operations to root out “extremists.”

Yet, strange, incongruous facts are emerging.  Film clips show officers ushering protesters into the building, however.  AOC flat out lied about her whereabouts and her “fear for her life.”  And the media pushed the narrative that five people had died in the protest, and advanced the claim that Officer Sicknick had died from being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.  None of this was true.

Most troubling was the death of Ashley Babbit, the unarmed woman that appeared to be attempting to crawl through a broken window.  Film of her shooting showed that armed capitol guards were directly behind her.   She was given no warning.   A gun appeared and put her down.   The identity of the person that shot her was not revealed by the government and no charges were brought against the officer, even though it was highly questionable whether deadly force was justified.

All of these issues raise real questions over the “insurrection,” and make a “Reichstag fire” alternative narrative something to think about.

The Christmas Bombing

Early in the wee hours of Christmas morning while sugar plums were still dancing in our heads, a bomb ripped through downtown Nashville, near the AT&T communications center.  Oddly, the bomber(s) picked a time when it was almost certain that no one would be around.  The truck announced a warning to evacuate before the bomb went off.   That’s not how terrorists usually operate.

Within 48 hours, the F.B.I. had claimed that they had identified the bomber through his DNA and announced that he was a “lone wolf.”  So the F.B.I. really wants us to believe that it is so efficient that it was able to identify the culprit, interview his family, neighbors and coworkers, access his computer and phone and look through his correspondence and social media accounts, all in 48 hours.  Hmmm.

AP and Hamas

Before destroying the building that housed the Associated Press and Hamas, the IDF gave ample warning to evacuate.  The AP complained and asserted that it did not know that the building also housed Hamas.

Right.

The Election
Much has been written about the midnight ballot drops, statistical anomalies and odd behavior of officials in key swing states, so I won’t regurgitate assertions here.  But these anomalies and the fact that the Biden campaign drew little enthusiasm raises serious questions about the outcome.

 

Because we no longer have an independent inquiring press that acts as a watchdog on government, we have learned to be very skeptical of narratives.  Time and time again, we have seen the press either withhold information (as it did with Hunter Biden), distort facts (as it did with the Covington kids) or outright lie (as it did with officer Sicknick).  When we cannot count on independent journalists to dispassionately dig out the truth, we create our own possible narratives.

And when we do, we are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

Except, sometimes they turn out to be the most accurate interpretation of facts.

The Last Million

 

David Nasaw has written a marvelous book that deeply resonated with me.   The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War is a meticulously researched book dealing with the human aftermath of WWII.  The convulsions and destruction of the war were so vast and the administration of the countries devastated by the war, the immediate onset of the Cold War, and lingering antisemitism and fears of displaced Jews and survivors of the camps together created difficulties for the Allies for years.

These were people with no place to go—Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, along with European Jews that were liberated from Hitler’s camps.    Their homes had been destroyed, their livelihoods taken from them.   They were caught between the West and the Soviet partitioning of Europe, with a Soviet Union that sought to gobble up parts of war-torn Europe. 

The Displaced Persons (DP) camps presented a terrible sorting problem for the U.S. and U.K.    As post-war labor shortages loomed, Western nations were also facing pressure from the Soviets to repatriate peoples from the territories over which they had dominion and control.  Most of the Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians were fiercely anti-Communists and did not wish to return to their Soviet dominated homeland.

The most difficult and wrenching issue were the Jews, who were so horribly abused by the Third Reich.  Nasaw notes that there were no Jewish children or elderly in the DP camps—they had been killed by the Nazi regime.  The Brits actively blocked them from being resettled in Palestine out of the concern that it would trigger bloodshed with the Arabs.  They often couldn’t go back to their homes and the Americans didn’t give them priority either, and many foundered for years in these camps.  Jared Kushner’s grandmother spent 3 ½ years in a DP camp.  “Nobody wanted us,” she said.

The book clarified a great deal with me.  I grew up among these people in the 60’s and early 70’s in Chicago.  While my family fortunately was here before the war (my grandfather slipped out of Austria in 1929), the parents of many of my friends either escaped the Stalin deportations from Lithuania or were Poles from the DP camps.   Indeed, two parishes—one Lithuanian and one Polish were adjacent to each other a few blocks away (they have since been combined and to this day the parish says Masses in Lithuanian and Polish). 

Many of these people were reluctant to speak about their wartime and post-wartime experiences, although all were virulently anti-Communist. I still recall some of the antisemitism that permeated the community.  “He’s only crying because he can’t keep the money,” I recall one Lithuanian saying as he watched Jerry Lewis break down at the end of one of his telethons.  There were a few more insidious characters as well.  One of my friends disclosed that he had seen his father’s Waffen-SS uniform in a box in the attic.  One saloon keeper actually fought for the Wehrmacht and would sometimes show his scars to patrons.   I recall an instance in which young children were gathered round a two-flat chanting “Nazi. Nazi” where a middle aged man lived alone in an attic apartment and didn’t interact with his neighbors.  Nonetheless, there were a few Jews that lived peaceably in the community—mostly small shopkeepers.

Nasam’s book gripped me in many respects.  Growing up, I was oblivious to what these people experienced and endured during the war and its immediate aftermath.   He reminded me of the trials that they endured, and yet, torn from their community, transported to a place where they didn’t know the language, they were able to piece their lives back together, raise families and live together in peace—sometimes along side people they had fought against a few years earlier. 

The problems of sorting and vetting immigrants are still with us, decades later.  The advent of the Cold War and the absence of documentation prevented us from doing a robust job of screening out Nazi collaborators and war criminals and bringing them to justice decades ago.   We are similarly today locked in a political battle  to prevent human traffickers, MS-13 members and drug dealers from slipping across our border.   We had a tremendous problem vetting refugees from war torn Syria and the travel ban imposed by Trump on terrorist hotbeds caused great controversy. 

Somehow, we generally do seem to muddle through and incorporate these peoples into our country.

Zombie Children

 

There is a horrible, gruesome scene at the end of the classic horror film, Night of the Living Dead in which the little girl that has been bitten by a zombie comes back to life and while her mother begs her sweet little daughter for her life, repeatedly stabs her mother to death with a trowel with screeching sounds in the background in a scene reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho.  The dissonance of the murderous scene is jarring to us as a child turned cold murderer, so devoid of humanity that she brutally stabs her mother.  The little girl later goes after the film’s hero.  He is able to fend her off, toss her aside, and barricade himself in the farmhouse basement.

That film, which recently turned 50 (both actresses that played the daughter and mother are still alive, ironically) was prescient and is a metaphor for what is happening on our streets today.

Children in certain areas of our cities have turned into zombie-like soulless killers, with no regard for human life and are stalking us.  Our law enforcement and criminal justice system is ill-equipped to deal with them.  

In November of 2019, little Tessa Majors, a freshman at Barnard College was stabbed to death by a 14 year old in Manhattan.

The two girls that coldly murdered Mohammed Anwar in DC last month were 13 and 15.

The knife wielding Ma’Kia Bryant was shot and killed in Ohio as she raised the blade fully intending to stab her victim to death as she announced her intent to do so.   Bryant was 16.

Also in Ohio a 13 year old girl stabbed another 13 year old to death.

Right here in Chicago, 13 year old Adam Toledo was shot and killed by a Chicago cop, a split second after he dropped a gun after a foot chase down a dark alley.  The officer had responded to a call that someone was shooting up cars.   Young Toledo had been given the nicknames “Li’l Homicide” and “Bavy Diablo,” clues to his “innocence.”

Chicago also has had some 2,000 carjackings from January 2020 through today.  Many are done by armed youngsters as young as 10 years old.

These incidents are not one-off occurrences.  They are happening every day, primarily in large metropolitan areas of blue states.

The Woke Left blames society at large, law enforcement, or, more absurdly, the victims themselves.  When Tessa Majors was murdered, the MSM put out the claim that she was in the park trying to buy pot.   When Mohammed Anwar was murdered, Mayor Bottoms tweeted (since deleted) that car owners needed to be more careful guarding their autos.  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, blamed all of society for the death of young gangbanger Adam Toledo.  “We failed Adam,” she exclaimed, then promptly ordered the police department to cease chases unless the officer received permission from his supervisor.  A social justice warrior fund (Chicago Community Bail Fund)  posted bail for the gangbanger that provided Toledo with his weapon.  In the case of knife wielding Bryant,  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki immediately talked about race and proclaimed, “She was a child.” 

These juvenile terrorists are proliferating in a society that seems increasingly pathological.   It is a problem that is mostly confined to minorities, where the illegitimacy rate is 70%, or where there is little or no parental oversight.  

Ma’Kia Bryant had been placed in a foster home.  Adam Toledo’s mother did not report him missing for 72 hours.  One has to assume that the killers of Tessa Majors and Mohammed Anwar have similar unstable backgrounds.  Yet Black Lives Matter proudly proclaimed that the destruction of the nuclear family was one of its basic tenets (since removed from its website), and we are now seeing the fruits of the destruction of the family and the downgrade of religion.

The question remains – what to do about these child killers and terrorists.   Pandemic has kept them out of school.  Gangs know that the criminal justice system will go soft on them. 

The Supreme Court last week ruled 6-3 in Jones v. Mississippi that a juvenile may be sentenced to life without parole without a showing that the child is incorrigible.  In that case, a minor brutally murdered his own grandfather, stabbing him multiple times—so viciously that he broke the knife.  Laurence Tribe remarked, “it gutted the just and decent treatment of juveniles.”

But what is the just and decent treatment of juveniles that are so lacking in behavioral inhibitions that they would commit such heinous crimes?   Even with therapy and a structured environment, what does the future hold for the soulless little killer of Tessa Majors, or the two girls that coldly killed Mr. Anwar and were seen on video obsessed with finding their cell phones, while Anwar died in a crumpled heap?  Is there any doubt that if Adam Toledo had slipped away that he would have eventually taken the life of someone else, if he hasn’t already?  The answer cannot be 6 months with a social worker and turn them loose on society again. 

Our society is now so ill that it has bred a whole legion of feral children—zombie-like creatures, like the little girl in Night of the Living Dead, directly out of a Steven King novel, that will stalk and terrorize us while the New Left points fingers at law enforcement officers that are struggling to protect us against them.

Think for a moment of the officers that were faced with the awful choice of pulling the trigger on Bryant or Toledo and what they now have to live with, attempting to keep them from destroying the lives of others.   These events represent the essence of Critical Theory—to place a decisionmaker into a no-win situation.  In Toledo’s case, if the officer doesn’t shoot, he may be killed.  In Bryant’s situation, if the officer doesn’t shoot, the victim will likely be killed.  In each case, the officer is in an awful position—and must decide in a split second.

We are experiencing Night of the Living Dead in real life.

Conspiracy Theories

 

Tucker Carlson was slammed by the Antidefamation League last week for asserting that Democrats are attempting to replace the population with immigrants (legal or not) that would be more likely to vote Democratic in future elections.  He has been vilified on social media for being a “white supremacist” and a “conspiracy theorist.”   He contends that demographic change is the key to the Democrats’ political ambitions.” 

I actually think he’s understating the problem.  It would be hard to dream up a better and more insidious plan to cement one party rule over the country than is being executed now.  It is so wonderfully Stalinist, yet much more stealthy and sophisticated than the brute Stalin could design, or even Adolph for that matter.

Adolph asserted sovereignty for his vision by seeking liebensraum for the German peoples.   His political adversaries, the Bolsheviks, were jailed, beaten and murdered.  Jews were rounded up into ghettos, humiliated and ultimately deported to the camps on boxcars for extermination.   Stalin engaged in similar tactics, although he was not quite as systematic, efficient and industrial as the Nazis.  He starved out the Ukrainians and deported Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians to Siberia to exert control over those lands. 

Today’s Leftists in America are a bit more nuanced (although I suspect that if Plan A ran into roadblocks, they would become less so).   But they are engaging in a form of ethnic and political cleansing no less ambitious than what Hitler and Stalin engaged in.   

If you wish to take over a country and assert sovereignty over it, what do you do?   First, you take over the cities.   That is what armies have done for hundreds of years.  Our armed forces most recently asserted control over Baghdad, Basra, Fallujah and Mosul.   In Afghanistan, we went for Kabul and Kandahar.   World War II in Europe wasn’t settled until we took control of Berlin.  The American Left knows that these major cities are the nerve centers and they wish to have complete control over them.  Make no mistake, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, LA, Portland and Seattle are already under control and the deportations have commenced.

What?  What deportations?  Believe me, they are happening.

The American Left is much more sophisticated than the 20^th century tyrants.  They rely much more on subterfuge than their 20^th century counterparts.   Barack Obama and Susan Rice are much smoother than Old Uncle Joe Stalin.  They are engaging in ethnic cleansing and deportations by simultaneously making these cities unlivable for the existing professional, entrepreneurial and working class and making them very attractive for illegal immigrants and the underclass.  

Aided by the COVID19 pandemic, these cities are no longer livable for most people.

Unlike Stalin and Hitler who herded people into boxcars, working people are self-deporting.  The boxcars are not necessary.

The most important factor is safety.  Murder and sexual assault rates have skyrocketed.  Cashless bail and failure to prosecute has led the “Criminals Gone Wild.”   Illinois just signed into law its criminal reform bill forbidding police to even give chase to criminals.  Carjackings are a routine occurrence now.  You have to be able to go to work every day and enjoy the cultural aspects of a city relatively free of fear of physical harm.   Even after pandemic recedes, citizens are going to be very reluctant to go into the city in the evening for a symphony concert, opera or a play.  New York’s mayor DeBlasio took over several hotels on the Upper West Side and placed homeless, drug addicts, and sex offenders.   Hundreds of them are now wandering around the once middle class vibrant neighborhood, defecating in in the street, harassing and assaulting people at outdoor bistros, and masturbating in the open.   Illinois just passed a criminal reform act and human rights acts, putting restrictions on police (i.e. prohibiting them from chasing perps) and putting burdens on employers (prohibiting them from “undue” discrimination against job applicants with criminal convictions).  In Illinois, landlords cannot make inquiries of prospective tenants about their prior criminal history.  All this is to make urban areas less safe, less livable and more accommodating to criminals.

Taxes.   Illinois and New York continue to raise taxes.  The progressive tax failed in Illinois but they will try again.   New York is raising its top tax rate.  California’s is at 13.3%.   Property taxes in Illinois are the 2^nd highest in the country.   The bottom line is that these places are no longer places where a person can reasonably hope to build a net worth.  The state will confiscate it.

Education.  Pandemic highlighted the state of education in these places.  Unions in Chicago are blocking teachers from going back to work.  And when they do go back to work, the schools have become little more than indoctrination camps.  In Illinois, “Culturally Sensitive Education” and LGBT history (whatever that is) are mandated by state law.  Since these cities are sanctuary cities, your children have to take a back seat to the children of illegal immigrants.

Adding this all up and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that certain segments of the urban populations are actively being driven out.  And because of the largesse from Washington, showering these mayors with federal dollars, they really don’t care much if their tax base flees.   They are being pushed out by implied threats of violence, the confiscation of wealth, and an education system that is not viable.  To rub salt in the wound, the cities are tearing down the edifices of our culture.  

The message is clear—your presence is no longer desired here.

But the politicians running these places are not quite as bad as those that ran 1930’s Germany.  They’re letting you decide to leave on your own.

For now.

If You Check Signatures We Will Leave

 

While it’s been awhile since I’ve been in business school, there are still a few things that I remember from my marketing and strategy classes.  I do remember a few of the maxims of the late great consultant, Peter Drucker, who famously asserted that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.”   Other classes taught us about market segmentation, the acquisition costs of a customer and how to build brand loyalty.  I have clear memories of an excellent Harvard Business Review article on the Boston Red Sox, who, despite a long World Series drought, were able to build a tremendous brand and fierce brand loyalty.

Major League Baseball, in particular, has some real challenges.  Its core fan base is aging out.  Younger fans perceive the game to be slow and boring.  And it has lots of competition for entertainment dollars. 

Yet last week MLB was compelled to jump into politics and announce that it was moving the Midsummer Classic from Atlanta to Denver in response to Georgia’s election law that requires a photo ID.   MLB moved the All Star Game to Denver despite the fact that Atlanta has a 51% black population vs. Denver at 9% and the move would disproportionately hurt black businesses in Atlanta.  To rub salt in the wound, Hank Aaron, the man that broke Babe Ruth’s home run record as a Brave, and an African American that suffered racial abuse as a result, died this year.  The game would have also served, in part,  as a celebration to his life and achievements.  Twitter erupted with charges of hypocrisy. The move was to a state with a black population of only 9% and it cost black businesses millions in revenue.   The usual slow-footed Marco Rubio skewered MLB commissioner Rob Manfred for not giving up his membership at Augusta.   But MLB marched on.

MLB had another choice—do nothing, say nothing.  Simply carry on.  But MLB felt compelled to react and thereby offend a nonsignificant segment of its customer base. 

Businesses go through a great deal of work to learn about customer preferences, and how to keep customers and sell those customers other things.  I fail to see how MLB’s decision does any of that.   From what I can gather from the reaction of fans on social media, baseball will likely suffer some level of drop off as did the NFL and NBA after their leap into politics.

Certainly, the move by MLB created quite a kerfuffle and there is some logic to the notion that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” but that only goes so far.  

MLB joins a lengthening list of companies that have gone Woke. The president of Coca-Cola chimed in with his criticism of the Georgia election law (only weeks after it was disclosed that their implicit bias training urged employees to “stop being so white”), as did Delta Airlines.  United Airlines announced that it was going to apply affirmative action to pilot training and hiring.  Demonstrations of Wokeness heated up a couple of years ago when Nike deep sixed the Betsy Ross flag sneaker.

Perhaps the personal wealth of the CEO’s of large corporations is too insulated from risk these days.  Even if they are fired, most get severance packages larger than the GDP of most developing nations.  In a bygone year, CEO’s burnished their images by taking high level board positions in civic institutions.  Today, I suppose it is more important for them to make visible demonstrations of their Woke bona fides.  But I am stunned by the fact that they are willing to do it at the expense of their customer base and their  shareholders.