Outdoor Spaces

 

It was quite a revealing juxtaposition of events that occurred over the past week.  I visited upon the website of the Chicago Botanic Garden to check on their summer hours and happened upon the institution’s statement “Our commitment to racial justice and equity,” which I found a bit odd for a garden.

The statement included the following sentences:

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed a process of self-examination and learning at the Garden.   We recognize that people of color often feel unwelcome in gardens, forest preserves, and parks, a direct result of historical oppression and violence in outdoor spaces.

I have questions and some observations about this remarkable assertion.

The statement chose to recognize BLM in all caps.  I wonder if it occurred to them that one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leveraged her position to build a nice little real estate portfolio and that BLM while raising millions has, to my knowledge, while provided absolutely zero support for the expansion of outdoor spaces and outdoor programs for urban black youths.  Go figure. 

I’m not sure how the Garden came to the conclusion that people of color feel unwelcome in gardens, forest, preserves, and parks.  Did they do a survey?  How do they know this?  Every time I have visited the Chicago Botanic Garden, I have observed quite a panoply of people “of color” and not “of color” – whites,  African Americans, Indians (are they “of color”?), Asians, Middle Easterners both in hijabs and kippas, and actual Africans.  Once last summer, I saw a small trio of Africans playing African music with a group gathered around them, enjoying a balmy summer evening.  I saw no hint that any of them felt unwelcome.

There is tremendous irony in the last phrase of this absurd statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In Chicago last 4^th of July weekend, nearly 100 people were shot, 17 were killed, 8 of them children.  Many of these incidents of violence are taking place in parks and outdoor spaces.  In my own old neighborhood, a 13 year old was shot in the head riding his bike on a Sunday morning.  Shootings routinely take place in and around Washington Park and Garfield Park. 

The statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden echoes the purported complicity in the normalization of violence against people of color by literature in the original faculty statement by the English Department at the University of Chicago. 

So, universities and gardens are unsafe places for people of color.

The hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that the violence of which these institutions decry is perpetrated by people of color, with people of color most often being the victims.  At the University of Chicago, two students have been violently killed… by people of color.  Last weekend, young Max Solomon was shot and killed on the “L” on his way to his summer internship.   The Woke organizations are beating their breasts about historical violence, yet ignore the violence that is going on each and every weekend…. and won’t discuss the perpetrators, and, in an era where even tulip bulbs and ferns are racialized, adeptly sidestep talking about their race.

As if to put an exclamation mark on things, a Chicago police officer and 2 ATF agents were shot directly in front of a police station on the South Side. 

Overlayed on this bloody weekend was the visit of our addled president, Joe Biden, to Illinois.  Biden, famously stated, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” and “[Republicans] want to put y’all back in chains.”  Yet, visiting Illinois a few days after the black community suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago history, Biden stayed far enough away from the South and West sides of the city that radiation from a nuclear blast wouldn’t reach him.  He assiduously avoided any contact with any black person that didn’t hold political office.

As more institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the American Writers Museum go Woke, they, like their president, remain a safe distance from the actual, relentless violence that is occurring every week in Chicago.

Erasing Naivete

 

Somehow, I have gotten behind in everything.  I’m behind at work.  I’m behind in blogging.  And I’m woefully behind in summer reading… and it’s not even July 4^th yet (Is July 4^th still a thing?).  I just picked up Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Plague Year.  Wright is a talented writer who, like Lionel Shriver, never disappoints.  I like The End of October and God Save Texas and I’ll be interested to read his take on this past year.

But before I set sail on Wright’s journey, I’m going to spin out a few of my own observations—more like surprises, I’d say, as we weathered pandemic and the social unrest of the past year.  Listening to one of Bret Weinstein’s podcasts a few weeks ago, I was struck by one of Weinstein’s quotes, “No matter how cynical I get, I find that I am still naïve.”   I’m with you on this one, Bret.  I suppose the first big surprise has been my own naivete. I mistakenly thought of myself as prudent and appropriately skeptical, but the past year showed that I fell far short.   Here are a few of the areas in which I was taken by surprise.

 

·        I wholly underestimated the number of tyrannical politicians and government officials.  As a bit of an amateur U.S. history buff, I have been fascinated by the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the writing and thinking of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton.  I understood the need to constrain government and the propensity of people to abuse power.  But I mistakenly thought that people raised in America with American ideals and values would exercise some restraint.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  With the COVID19 as their pretext,  the Governors Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and J.B. Pritzker steamrolled the individual liberties of their citizens.  Under the rubric of “flatten the curve,” religious liberty, freedom of association, freedom to travel all got flattened.   As I write this, J.B. Pritzker just extended yet again the 30 day “emergency” with no input from the legislature as COVID19 is receding.   Even worse, was the power grab of the Administrative State—the CDC putting a halt to evictions and Anthony Fauci basking in unelected and unaccountable power.

 

·        The reciprocal of the power grab has been the submissiveness of the American people.  This was a nation founded on rebellion and disobedience.  Yet, we witnessed a great deal of blind obedience to dictates that were not founded on empirical evidence or actual science.  Early on, we learned that there was very little risk of transmission out of doors.  Gyms and restaurants stayed shut with no evidence that they were incubators.  Still, people yelled at other people across the street and admonished them to mask up.   And I still see people walking around downtown Chicago alone, with masks on.  Even more ludicrous are people biking or driving alone with masks on.   I was astonished at how many citizens meekly submitted to their government… and how many turned into willing enforcers.   One day, I was at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, and inadvertently stepped about a foot over the spacing line that was taped on the floor.  A rather rotund, 260 lb. woman immediately gave me the death stare and wagged her finger at me.  She promptly ordered 3 doughnuts and a coffee with cream and sugar.  I could not resist, “If you’re serious about the risk to your health, you might want to rethink those doughnuts.”  Needless to say, I was hit with a barrage of expletives.

 

·        The third surprise was the collapse of higher education.  It was merely a dozen years ago that I read Jonathan Cole’s book The Great American University in which Cole made a wonderful case, extolling the excellence of America’s university system.  The American university system was the one area in which public and private institutions ran in parallel and made each other better.   He cited Columbia University and The University of Chicago as the best of the best because of their core curriculum requirements.   But fast forward a dozen years and the university system has quickly devolved into a network bloated wokeness indoctrination camps.  Even at the University of Chicago, wokeness has overtaken the school.  The heralded Booth School of Business is now running “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” workshops (with no empirical evidence that such a thing exists).  The English Department announced that it would only admit students interested in Black Studies in its graduate program next year.   The university launched an investigation into economist Harald Uhlig for evidence of “racism” because he had the temerity to assert that BLM was wrongheaded in its demand to defund the police.  And the university is contemplating establishing an entire department devoted to Critical Race Theory.   This is happening all over the country.  Harvard admitted activist David Hogg, who couldn’t get into a number of 3^rd rate schools.  Princeton just deleted its Greek or Latin language requirement for classics majors because it’s not “inclusive” enough.  Yale stopped offering its Western music class for the same reason.  The university system is now leading the way in the illiberal push.  Schools that once taught critical thinking are now purveyors of doctrinal orthodoxy… and overly expensive ones at that.

 

·        Finally, there is the corruption of media.  Media outlets always had a tilt, but now they are engaged in propagating straight falsehoods and distortions.   Donald Trump did not refer to the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “fine people.”   Nicholas Sandmann was portrayed as harassing the old Native American when it was actually the reverse.  Officer Sicknick was not killed by a fire extinguisher during the January 6 protests.  The summer of rioting, looting and burning was ludicrously referred to as peaceful protesting following the death of George Floyd.  The New York Times ran off Bari Weiss with her resignation letter becoming a sort of modern day Declaration of Independence.

 

(https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter)

From the false assertion that Trump urged people to drink fish tank cleaner to its failure to follow up and ask incisive questions about the Nashville bombing or the Las Vegas shooter, or what the mayor of Moscow’s wife was paying for when she wired $3.5 million into Hunter Biden’s account, the media as become corrupt beyond repair.

 

These developments and the depth of the corruption and decline in higher education caught me by surprise.

Maybe they shouldn’t have.

FAIR enough

 

As the Woke ideology consumes more and more of our formerly venerable institutions and corporations, those of us that value a liberal society are seeking refuge and camaraderie with like-minded individuals.

I think I have found one such organization—The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism or FAIR (www.fairforall.org).  I was initially attracted to it via a tweet from exiled journalist Bari Weiss and another tweet that called it a “non-woke ACLU.”  And it has an interesting and diverse array of public intellectuals as supporters and contributors—Bari herself, Columbia’s John McWhorter, Brown’s Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melissa Chen, among others.

I attended the FAIR Loving Day Celebration, marking the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that knocked down miscegenation laws.  The event was organized by Chicago Chapter co-leader Takyrica Kokoszka (an African American) and her husband, Larry (white), both teachers in the Chicago Public School System.

Here are some of the highlights:

·        Several people talked about the loss of friends over Wokeness and feeling alone.

·        One person alikened FAIR to a “secret society” which I echoed, referring to similar secret societies in the writings of Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in Community Czechoslovakia.

·        A born Brit that expressed his shock and dismay that free speech was under assault in the U.S.

·        Another University of Chicago educated woman that talked about her devotion to principles of free inquiry that she adopted at U of C that are now being threatened.

·        A woman physician that talked about her family’s experience as Holocaust survivors and her revulsion at the fact that she now is considered “privileged.”   She also talked about CRT invading her profession and interfering with her ability to take patients as they are.

·        Another gentlemen talked about his desire to “defund the universities, not the police.”

·        When one gentleman introduced himself as a U.S. history teacher, someone joked, “Which one?” (reference to 1619 Project.)

·        There was a woman from the old Soviet Union and a woman from Poland that were able to talk about what life in those societies were like.

·        A highlight for me was actually getting to spend some time getting to know Takyrica, a bright, enthusiastic, optimistic woman with a winning smile.

But here is the real punchline:   I did not detect any real partisanship in the room.  Of approximately 50 people in the room, I could not reliably predict the party affiliation of any of them.  Most spoke about free speech and the indoctrination going on in our educational system.  There was not a single mention by anyone of Trump or Biden.  That fact alone filled me with hope.

The next day, I listened to the full interview of Bari Weiss, one of the founders of FAIR, with Jordan Peterson.  Weiss, a self-proclaimed left of center journalist, said “I really believe that the fight for liberalism (I don’t mean that in the partisan sense but I mean that in terms of the values we’ve been describing in this conversation), that is more important than any amount of popularity, any amount of accolades on Twitter, than anything  else, and so I had to leave the institution in order to fight for liberalism, and that I see as the mission of my life.”

Conservatives and libertarians like me need to join hands with “liberals” like Bari Weiss, just as blacks must join hands with whites if we are to defeat the forces of illiberalism.   We cannot remain on the sidelines as our institutions fall one by one.  FAIR, I think, is a great step in the right direction.

I urge you to join and to listen to Weiss’s entire interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFTA9MJZ4KY)

 

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.