Up, Down and All Around

 If you are feeling disoriented and topsy-turvy right now, take heart.  You are not alone. We are experiencing the most wrenching changes since WWII, and while the global discord has not gotten very violent yet, it is just as disconcerting.  The media is telling you that men can get pregnant, vaccinations are so effective, they have to force you to get one, and all white people are irredeemably racist.  The rebellious old rockers now are all behind censorship, compliance and Big Pharma.

The consequence of all this is that old alliances and friendships are breaking apart, and new ones are forming.  Individuals are in the midst of a great rearranging, as Jodi Shaw noted in a tweet (responding to a friend that had whittled her friendships from 85 to 2:

You are  not alone.  This is a major transition and like all major transitions can be painful.  I would rather be part of an authentic, connected community than a fake and fearful one.

Things are being shaken up.  As an old Reagan Republican and Cold Warror, I find it fascinating and humorous that the thought leaders that I now follow most closely are old fashioned Jewish liberals- Bret Weinstein, Abigail Shrier, and Bari Weiss.  I’m sure none of these folks voted for Reagan and I’m sure that I would have several points of disagreement with them on a variety of issues.  But each of them is passionately devoted to free speech and work hard to support their positions with facts and data.  They are all intellectually honest and open minded. 

In addition, I never miss the conversations between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury (Self described as the “Black Guys”).  They sometimes disagree with each other and are uniquely qualified to address criminal justice, racial preferences, and voter “rights.” Glenn Loury teaches at Brown and originally hails from the South Side of Chicago. 

So, I’m listening intently to Jewish liberals on some issues and on criminal justice and other issues related to race, to a Black Guy from the South Side.

Go figure.  It’s 2022.  All the pieces are getting rearranged.

Here’s who’s up and who’s down.

Who’s Up.

Truckers. 
Particularly Canadian ones. What is going on in Canada is magnificent.  For most of my adult life, I held college professors and MD’s in higher esteem than truck drivers.  I have seen the error of my ways.  College professors led us down the racist path of CRT and into the unholy, immoral relationship with the CCP.  Truck drivers are now leading the convoy of liberty in Canada and have driven Woke WEF disciple Justine Trudeau into exile.  The protest of the truck drivers is the Boston Tea Party of the north. The truck drivers in Canada have made me wholly repentant of my heretofore intellectual snobbery.

Megyn Kelly
Megyn Kelly succumbed a bit to Icarus and Daedalus Syndrome.  She flew too close to the sun and attempted to capitalized on her “rock star” status by signing a huge contract with NBC.  All it took was one innocuous comment about doing “blackface” when she was a kid, and she was cut loose.

 Now, we naturally like to see people that seem to get a bit too full of themselves to get their commupance.   But Kelly is smart, ambitious, and talented.  Her podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, is a great reinvention.  Because podcasts are longer and more nuanced, they allow for more interesting discussions and Kelly is actually a better podcaster than a broadcaster.  You see more of her best self.

Who’s down

Claire Lehmann
The editor in chief of Quilette, which promotes itself as “Where Free Thought Lives” and a center of “Heterodox Ideas,” Lehmann has picked unnecessary fights with Bret Weinstein and has failed to see the dangers of the tyrannical Australian lockdowns.  Her tweet last week belies a naivete, or at least a lack of knowledge of Venn diagrams, as the people that are true believers in these three are one and the same:  "It is possible to decouple your opinions on social justice activism, vaccination & climate change.  Just because you agree with someone (or some group) on one of these, doesn't mean you have to agree with them on all."

Lehmann has a penchant for showing off her legs and midriff online and, would probably be the first to decry the objectification of women.  Her act has worn thin.

NPR
I was a faithful listener to NPR throughout the 80’s and into the 90’s.  I got my news from Carl Castle, Scott Simon and Susan Stamberg and got my arts and culture fix from Terry Gross.  Always tilting left, NPR has joined the unethical MSM.  Most recently, based on unnamed sources, NPR tried to put forward a story about a dust-up between Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch over masking.  The Supreme Court issues a statement refuting the story.  In August, after the Rittenhouse verdict that acquitted him, the first commentator used the term “far right” 8 times during her response.  Even Fresh Air has gotten boring, Woke and largely unlistenable.

The University of Chicago
Sadly, one of the last bastions of free thought and free speech is being overrun by the forces of Woke.  It began when Geoffrey Stone, co-author of the Chicago Principles and law school professor made a small concession and agreed that he would not offend students by using the “N” word as an example in his 1^st amendment class.  Fast forward to today, when the once venerable University of Chicago is contemplating establishing a Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity Department (the first clue was using a word that almost no one in common society uses (how many time have you used the word “Indigeniety”).  This is not scholarship.  It is activism.  If established, this department will attempt to assert itself as a supra-department and attempt to police every other department for “indicia of racism” and, without a doubt will seek to revise the Chicago Principles on Free Speech.  Kudos to Dorian Abbot, Harald Uhlig and the students at the Chicago Thinker for opposing this nonsense.  But the harsh reality is that I have yet to see a school or organization so embedded with the forces of Woke be able to reverse course. 

Black Lives Matter
Well, it turns out that BLM funneled $6.3 million to buy a mansion in Canada.  This is after founder Patrice Collor bought four high end homes for $3.2 million and then quit.  Now, the “charity” is missing $60 million and no one is apparently in charge.  And we can’t name a single project that it undertook to improve actual black lives—not a health center, a program, a donation to a HBCU—nothing. 

The Deal Changed

 A friend of mine confided to me that although he was college educated, and had a graduate degree and a professional career, that his actual lifestyle was not as good as his father’s- a career military guy that had not gone to college.   My friend lived in a smaller house, worked longer hours, took fewer vacations, did not have a second home, and was much less secure.

How did this happen?

I posited that one reason was that the State (writ large) and academia had conspired to extract his excess productivity and wealth creation.  Between taxes and college tuition that far exceeded the inflation rate, any of his gains were being soaked up by government and higher education.

He is not alone.

Just as the deal has changed with respect to living in an urban area, the deal with higher ed has changed.

Faced with inflation, companies would often reduce the size of the contents and the serving size—as if you wouldn’t notice a chocolate bar that is 1/3 smaller.  Higher ed has done the same thing.

Not only has it increased the price (since 1985, tuition increases have been roughly twice the inflation rate), but the product has been watered down, especially with the advent of Wokeness over the past decade.  Critical thinking is out. Woke is in.  History is out.  Grievance studies is in.  Tuition is so egregiously expensive that “working your way through college” has become an anachronism.

Look, we all bought into it.  I did.  I sent both of my kids to college.

The deal has changed.

First, the cost is prohibitive.  If you have to graduate with huge debts, and have to count on “debt cancellation,” it’s probably not worth it.  First of all, there is no such thing as “debt cancellation.” Debt that will not be paid back ends up running through someone’s income statement.  And that should not be the federal government.  Second, by permitting students to borrow money that cannot be paid back, academia is avoiding cost containment that every other industry has had to confront.  Third, academia has watered down its offerings.  A “gender studies” major at a liberal arts institution has hardly prepared a young person to earn a decent wage in a competitive economy.

With colleges at the forefront of “safe spaces,”  “trigger warnings,”  “preferred pronouns,” speech codes and such lunacy that inhibits critical thinking, the entire model is now questionable.  Instead of educating kids,  higher ed is enfantilizing them.  Almost all social science, literature and history departments are heavily liberal.   A conservative historian has almost zero chance of a faculty job anywhere in the US.  Postmodernism has a tight grip in academia, so the chances of getting exposure to a wide range of views is almost nil.  The lowering of standards to get the right gender and racial makeup has degraded these places as the price has gone up.

Finally, the COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates remote learning have really changed the deal.  Putting aside the morality of forced vaccines (with unknown long term consequences) on a healthy population and either masked or remote learning is hardly worth the tuition price.

I read with great pleasure Jonathan Cole’s 2009 book The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensible National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.   Cole’s 2009 book asserts that the US higher education is a marvel of the world.   A mere 13 years later, I wonder if Cole holds the same view.   My old professor, Daniel Pipes clearly does not.  He sees a painful and abrupt reckoning on the horizon for higher education in his March, 2021 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

https://www.danielpipes.org/20318/the-future-of-us-higher-education

Even at my alma mater, which had codified its principles of free speech, Wokeism has chipped away at its edifice.  Free speech, free thought is the essence of a liberal education.  And it is being systematically suffocated at most universities.

Finally, there is China.   The pernicious influence of the CCP throughout higher education cannot be understated.  From the recent conviction of Charles Liebman, head of the chemistry department at Harvard to the China BiWeekly Seminar on Public Economics at The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, the CCP has infiltrated throughout higher education.  We have between 300-400 thousand Chinese students here every year.  Why are we educating Chinese youth, while neglecting our own?  These students will become the foundation for the regime that seeks to upend the U.S.  One only needs to look at the NBA to see what happens to free speech and free thought when an industry becomes dependent on Chinese money. 

The deal has been changed.  As with urban living, we need to rethink our deal with higher education.  The quality has gone down.  The price has gone up.  It has been repurposed for aims that are anti-Enlightenment.   And it has allowed the CCP to take residence.   In the parlance of the Woke, higher ed needs to be deconstructed.

 

Re-Traded

 

One of the most fundamental concepts in the study of economics is tradeoffs.  As the wise Mick Jagger put it years ago, “You can’t always get what you want.”   Choices almost always involve tradeoffs.

We are experiencing the largest shift in “the deal” since the Dust Bowl.

Where you and your family choose to live involves a series of tradeoffs.   There are three basic choices (and some subchoices)--- large urban metropolitan area, small town, and rural.

The deal has been shifting for some time, but with Woke DA’s being installed in most large metro areas coupled with the arrival of COVID, they changed the deal.

Many of us accepted the tradeoff of living in a large metropolitan area and the deal was this:   You accepted a certain amount of congestion, pollution, a little crime, higher taxes, and yes, a bit of corruption.  In return, you were part of a large labor and employer pool and consequently made more money, had access to better health care, cultural institutions and events, and a wide variety of restaurants.  

But the deal has been changed fairly dramatically over the last two years, and the documented flow of people out of California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois confirms it.  And because it takes planning to move (need to find suitable employment and housing), this flow is likely to turn into a flood.

In cities like Chicago, the crime has gotten so out of control that the cultural institutions and restaurants are pretty much off limits unless you want to take your life into your hands.  One friend of a friend of mine was shot coming home from a Blackhawks game this fall.  A retired teacher was shot and killed on the way home from a White Sox game last summer.  Two Blackhawks players were carjacked in the West Loop recently.  A graduate student was stabbed to death on a Sunday morning near Sears Tower.  A recent University of Chicago graduate was shot and killed in the afternoon in Hyde Park.   There were over 1400 carjackings last year in the city and only 106 arrests.  And when they do get arrested, they are out on cashless bail.  Violent criminals roam the streets on electronic monitoring. 

To give you a flavor of how bad things have gotten, I participated in a Moby Dick read-a-thon at the Newberry Library just north of downtown three years ago, in which I was scheduled to read my chapters at 3 am.   There is no way in the world I would do that today.  Recently, one old friend of mine wanted to get together with me for drinks, but asked if I could join him late in the afternoon.  Because of the danger, he makes it a point to be out of the city by 6 p.m.

The deal has changed in major U.S. cities--- Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, LA, San Francisco.  Rampant crime (along with COVID restrictions) have made it much less likely that people will enjoy the restaurants and culture offered by the cities.   Remote work has made it possible for many professionals to be employed at relatively high wages without experiencing the congestion of a commute. 

Two basic government functions are to protect your person and your belongings and to provide K-12 education.  In these cities, the police are under severe restrictions and the DA’s don’t prosecute.  The union-controlled school systems either miseducate or, in places like Chicago, don’t educate at all.  Escalating taxes are paying for what, exactly?  A school system that won't teach and a police force that is prohibited from protecting you.

A few years ago, a logical move for empty nesters would be to sell the home in the suburbs and get a condo downtown so they could walk to the office, restaurants and cultural events.   That is now off the table.   In the summer of 2020, those people cowered in their building as they hear glass smashing on the first floor during the George Floyd riots.  There is no credible plan in any of these cities to restore a modicum of order.   Moving downtown is now off the table.

The deal got re-traded and isn't likely to be restored anytime soon.  The flow out of these cities to small towns and rural areas is about to become a torrent.

Next, I will write about the re-trade in higher education.

2021- The Best Of

 

It was a weird year,  the second full year of COVID19 restrictions.  During this topsy turvy year, the Vatican slapped restrictions on saying the Latin Mass.  The Illinois Holocaust Museum made “show me your papers” a requirement for admission and then squelched dissent on the internet.   At least it didn’t have a loudspeaker at the entrance, barking “Mach schnell!” to give it the full effect.  That’s where we are now.

There was an attempt to return to normalcy by summer.  Baseball was played.  Ravinia had somewhat of a season, although it was very lightly attended.  Movie theaters re-opened. 

It this tentative and somewhat abbreviated year, there were some highlights, nonetheless.

Film

I have to confess, I have some catching up to do.  I saw relatively few films this year and I will try to catch up during the icy months.

But of the films I saw, I liked Minari, a film about a young Korean family that emigrates to Arkansas after immigrating from Korea and tries to make a go of it by working the land.   It’s somewhat of a remake of The Grapes of Wrath story, with all the family drama.  A Quiet Place II wasn’t bad, especially since there has been a paucity of good sci-fi and horror films lately.

Nomadland received best picture at the Academy Awards but I thought it was awful- dark, depressing, spartan with uninteresting characters.  It was especially tedious since we are living through a dark, depressing, dystopian period.   Similarly, Land was predictable and tedious, and I had high expectations for it.

The more interesting medium were a few mini-series that I liked a great deal.  At the top of the list was Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.  Queen’s Gambit was magnificent.  The acting was very good.  The writing was excellent and the character development was superb.  Anya Taylor-Joy was a wonderfully complex character.  The writers were able to translate a slow moving game into a riveting experience.  The Beth Harmon character was a bit of a composite of Bobby Fischer and Janis Joplin.  Marcin Dorocinski played her Russian nemesis, Vasily Borgov.  Dorocinski is actually Polish and is one of a raft of excellent Polish dramatic talent that surfaced in the last couple of years.

World on Fire was a WWII drama and PBS mini-series, starring Helen Hunt.  The first installment was centered on early WWII.   It was a sweeping project, developing characters on several continents.  Like Queen’s Gambit, I found it to be quite authentic (except for a couple of Woke nods).   Helen Hunt was outstanding and the scenes in Poland were done by Polish actors, headed up by the young, beautiful and talented Zofia Wichlacz.   I’m very much looking forward to Season 2. 

PBS Masterpiece also pulled off another masterpiece with All Creatures and Small.  The beloved James Herriot books were wonderfully done in this remake.   Season 2 starts soon and can’t get here fast enough. 

Books

Fiction

This was a tossup.  I really liked Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver.  This novel is about an older couple that makes a mutual suicide pact to avoid the inevitable decline and expense of old age. The twist is that Shriver ingeniously provides alternative endings.   Shriver’s biting and incisive intellect just drips out of this novel.  Also very inventive was Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro.  In this futuristic (but not far off) novel, a family purchases a synthetic companion for their chronically ill daughter.

Both these novels deal with themes that baby boomers will likely have to confront in the near future.  And both authors handled these issues in very original ways.

Nonfiction

There were several excellent candidates in this category.  We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter was very good as was This is How the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth.   Nuclear Armageddon is no longer our sole humanity ending dread.

But my vote for best nonfiction book goes to the dean of American History, Gordon S. Wood for his short and very readable concise volume, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution.  In less than 200 pages, the 87 year old Wood spins out an essential primer on our great Republic.  In seven short chapters, he lays out an essential foundation of how we came into being, and the origins of our Constitution.  Best of all, Wood devotes an entire chapter entitled Slavery and Constitutionalism to destroying The 1619 Project and the falsehoods being propagated by Nicole Hannah-Jones without even naming her or The 1619 Project.  He utterly upends her basic argument:

The Revolution changed everything: unfreedom could no longer be taken for granted as a normal part of hierarchical society.  Almost overnight black slavery and white servitude became conspicuous and reviled in ways that they had not been earlier.

He goes on later to assert:

With independence, nearly all the independent states, including Virginia, began moving against slavery, initiating what became the first great antislavery movement in world history. The desire to abolish slavery was not an incidental offshoot of the Revolution; it was not an unintended consequence of the contagion of liberty.  It was part and parcel of the many enlightened reforms that were integral to the republican revolutions taking place in the new states.

And just like that, Hannah-Jones argument is laid waste.

I had an opportunity to hear Gordon Wood speak and meet him a couple of years ago.  With Samuel Eliot Morison, Page Smith, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn gone, Wood is one of the last to hold up the candle of the miracle of the origins of America.  American History departments have been shrunk to almost nonexistence and have been stuffed with the gender studies and grievance studies people.   Wood is a treasure and, at 87, this may be his last, but best effort.

 

Thank God It's Over Pt. 1

 

Like most of you, I am eager to put 2021 behind me.  It was a strange and disorienting year, one in which we nearly completed two years of “15 days to flatten the curve,” the Biden Administration took over the reins of government, Afghanistan collapsed, inflation reared its ugly head with a vengeance, cities were wracked by rampant crime, CRT demonstrated how embedded they were in our educational system and China threatened us with hypersonic nuclear missiles.  Trump’s exit from government did not heal our divisions.

It would be easy to fall into hopelessness and despair.

But I am rather hopeful.   COVID19 and CRT seem intractable in our society but I see some very positive developments.   That is why my year end post will be a little different that I have posted in previous years.

2021 was the year of The Great Realignment.

COVID19 changed our patterns of living, as did the unchecked crime in urban areas.  And the false religion of CRT changed our relationships with many established institutions.   We woke up one morning to find that we could not go to the office, and now we are in the process of being barred from restaurants, bars and public places unless we have a government approved vaxx pass.  We also woke up to find that our liberal institutions—the media, higher education, and K-12 education systems are not liberal at all.  They had been transformed into propaganda centers, from which dissenters were exiled and publicly pilloried with the scary label, “RACIST!”  A society that barred religion from schools and the public square now embraced the new Woke religion, which had made its doctrine compulsory in schools and workplaces across the country.  Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion became omnipresent and if you so much as raised a skeptical eyebrow, you were… well, excluded.  Similarly, despite the very mixed results of the vaccines, the unvaccinated are also in the process of being marginalized, treated like lepers of biblical times.

Throughout history, totalitarians have enjoyed a tremendous first mover advantage.   But the pushback has begun in earnest, and it is gathering momentum.

In The Great Realignment, I have shifted away from organizations that have gone Woke.  I dropped my membership in the American Writers Museum as soon as it had a program featuring Kathy Griffin.  I punted the Newberry Library as soon as it held a Drag Queen Story Hour.  When The American Scholar featured “The Problem with Whiteness” as its cover article, I immediately canceled my subscription with a note, “There is no problem with Whiteness.”  When Loyola Academy decided to permit a large Black Lives Matter sign and begin allowing CRT into the curriculum, donations to that institution were halted.

Instead, I shifted my memberships, donations and subscriptions to the non-Woke.  Library of America gained a new member.  The Willa Cather Foundation did not go Woke, so I signed up (she is one of my favorite writers).  I moved my subscriptions to The Spectator and Backwoods Home magazines.  I dropped the N.F.L., N.B.A. and MLB and pivoted to golf and hiking instead, becoming more of a doer than a spectator.  Most significantly, I joined The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a grassroots organization aimed at restoring the principles of MLK (www.fairforall.org) and have attended several of its events. 

The Great Realignment also pushed me beyond the traditional Republican/Democrat or Conservative/Liberal dichotomies.   With the degradation of journalism, I sought out other avenues to hear what others have to say about the momentous events and changes that seemed to be occurring.

I found podcasts to be much more in depth, nuanced and intellectually honest that anything produced by institutional print, broadcast or social media.

Here are the podcasts that I regularly listen to:

-Dark Horse Podcast – Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a husband-wife team of evolutionary biologists that were run off by the Wokesters at Evergreen State and have a lot to say about the COVID19 pandemic, among other topics.

-Honestly with Bari Weiss- Another person canceled by the New York Times and now has her own substack and podcast.  She has displaced Terry Gross as the finest interviewer in the country.  Her September 8 interview with author Abigail Shier, Courage in the Face of Book Burners, is simply magnificent.

-New Discourses by James Lindsay- an in-depth explication of the Woke, CRT and Trans movements and their antecedents -Marxism, Maoism and Stalinism.  

-The Glenn Show- Podcast by Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury.  Glenn brings authenticity of his Chicago South Side roots to push back on Woke.  As an African-American from inner city Chicago, he brings a particularly poignant point of view to the fray.

-The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast- Back from his leave, Peterson had warned us about the dangers of post-modernism years ago.  

-The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad.  Like Peterson, Saad has been pushing back against the “Blue Hair People” for decades.  Like Bari Weiss, he is an excellent interviewer, and meets the challenge with humor and sarcasm rather than anger and bitterness.  His book, The Parasitic Mind was one of the best books I’ve read this year.   His most recent interviews with UChicago professor Dorian Abbot, Sociologist Goran Adamson and Dr. Janice Fiamengo are not to be missed.

Two of the writers that I most enjoy are:

Peachy Keenan, the non de plume of a young Catholic mom from California, who writes for americanmind.org.  Her writing is punchy, witty and sensible.  She is a more refined, less bitter, caustic and obnoxious version of Anne Coulter. 

Douglas Murray, author and defender of the West.  Murray has written The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp4XhZytdD0

As a rather traditional Christian Reagan pro-American conservative, I find it fascinating that two of the people that I pay attention to are Canadian- Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad and Douglas Murray is British.  And the podcasts I never miss are Honestly and Dark Horse, by two traditional liberals, Bari Weiss and Bret Weinstein.  This is a signal that there is a true realignment.  I find a much greater intellectual kinship with Weiss and Weinstein than most mainstream Republicans these days.

Crime and Punishment

 

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot visited LA and San Francisco to see how they handle smash-n-grab.  That’s a bit like sitting down with Elizabeth Holmes, formerly of Theranos to see how she did product development.

Major cities across the US are in the midst of a crime wave, enabled in large part by Woke DA’s whose elections were financed by George Soros and Woke “bail reform” efforts that have led to violent criminals being released without bond.  

Chicago, in particular, is under siege, having eclipsed 800 murders so far this year, some of them quite heinous.

·        A 70 year old retired special ed teacher slain on the way home from a White Sox game on the Dan Ryan Expressway.  The shooter was identified but never charged.

·        A 36 year old female graduate student was stabbed to death just blocks from Sears Tower on a Sunday morning.

·        Most recently, a 71 year old former restauranteur was executed in Chinatown.

·        A University of Chicago student was slain on the way home from his internship last summer and a recent graduate was murdered in the middle of the day for $600 worth of goods.

This is just a sampling of the horrific occurrences over the past year in Chicago, which has seen over 4,300 shootings, 1,600 carjackings, beatings, muggings and numerous other organized smash and grabs.  The spike in crime has devastated these cities.  Restaurants, retail establishments and tourism are taking a beating.   Large retailers like Target have gone to Congress asking for help.   Joe Perillo, owner of Gold Coast Exotic Motor Cars in Chicago, a one-time supporter of Lightfoot publicly lashed out, “Enough is enough.”

Ironically, during the same week as Jussie Smollett was convicted of staging a fake hate crime, Woom Sing Tse was randomly shot and killed in broad daylight.

In the midst of all this, I raise some important issues:

1.      Why was Darrell Brooks, the driver of the SUV that mowed down 60 people in Waukesha, not charged with a hate crime?  Why was Alphonso Joyner similarly not charged with a hate crime for the murder of Mr. Tse in Chicago? You can bet that if races were reversed, charges would be brought.  If we are to invoke hate crime statutes, shouldn’t they go both ways?

2.      Isn’t a fake hate crime actually worse than a hate crime?  A hate crime is directed at one or more individuals.  A fake hate crime, however, is directed at societal cohesion as a whole.  It is calculated to create racial animus where none exists.  Moreover, in the cases of Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett, those perpetrators had accomplices.   Politicians and the media were more than willing to make judgments before any of the facts were known.  In the case of the actual perpetrator, the correct punishment should be

3.      What do we do about “feral youth?”  This is perhaps the most difficult and vexing question our society must face with regard to criminal justice.  One of the teens involved in the robbery and murder of 18 year old Tessa Majors in NY was only 13 at the time and was sentenced to a mere 18 months in juvenile detention.  The teen girls that killed the Pakistani Uber Eats driver received an easy plea deal.  In Chicago,  young Adam (Li’l Homicide) Toledo was killed by a Chicago patrolman when he turned with a gun in his hand in a dark gangway in the middle of the night.  Carjackers are often 10-16 years old and I saw one film clip of a 5 year old kid that was part of a carjacking team.   What is to be done with these rogue youngsters.  In the case of youths that would be convicted of murder or attempted murder, as the girls that killed the Pakistani driver, I would be hard pressed to have hopes for a future for them, or that they could be rehabbed.  

4.      The explosion of crime in major cities simultaneously leads one to question whether this is simply a wrongheaded set of policies or whether something more nefarious is going on.   Is there intent to  purposefully force professional class and working class citizens (mostly white) people out of urban areas—deport them, if you will, or rather lead them to self-deport?  In Chicago, it seems to be backfiring, as professional class and working class blacks are exiting the city.

These are not easy issues to discuss but they must be faced head on if we are to save our great American cities.

Mythbusting

 I’m going to write a few things that will make some people uncomfortable.  So be it.  We’re well past the point of comfort now.  Most people understand that we are in a different place now, that many of our institutional safeguards have given way and many institutions such as the FBI and CDC, instituions that we expected to protect us and be nonpartisan about it, have become partisan tools.   To be sure, some of the erosion has been due to COVID, but much has been due to accepting as gospel myths that turned out to be false.  And I freely admit that to some extent and at one time or another, I bought into all of these. 

No longer.

We need to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. 

This pithy slogan of George W. Bush was used as the justification for invading Iraq and for the 20 year debacle in Afghanistan.  In the shadow of the horrors of 9/11, it seemed to make sense.  We all heard the last calls of the frightened people on flight 93 and those trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.  We all got behind W’s rationale for doing anything it took not to have that happen again.  But it turned out to be a false choice.  

We spent billions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, only to erode our standing in the world, exhaust our military, increase Iran’s influence in the Middle East and leave the Taliban with a nation state and advanced weapons. 

Al Qaeda and the Taliban and Iraq deserved an appropriate response but our policymakers chose the highest cost option—in blood and treasure.  And an overlooked cost to these misadventures is that we gave our future adversaries a free look at our doctrines, strategies, tactics and technologies.  And in the case of Afghanistan, we actually turned our weapons over to them.

If we have free and open commercial trade with China, a more prosperous middle class will bubble up, demand more freedom and the CCP will be forced to moderate, and China will become more like us.

A mere 4 years ago, I sat in the audience while Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama proclaimed this and a year later, I had lunch with libertarian economist Deirdre McCloskey, who voiced similar sentiments.  Enriching China may turn out to be the biggest policy mistake in history.  Our politicians blithely overlooked Tiananmen Square for three decades, pretended it didn’t happen and kept waiting for this sea change to occur.  What we got was exactly the opposite of what was predicted by the “experts” – an aggressive, bullying dictatorship that abrogated its deal on Hong Kong,  is threatening Taiwan, lying and covering up the COVID outbreak, threatening us with hypersonic missiles, and exercising hegemony in the South China Sea.  Our political, cultural and business leaders grovel before the CCP.  The NBA fears being shut out and disciplines people that criticize China.  Congressman Eric Swalwell openly cavorts with Chinese spy Fang Fang without serious repercussions, and the leader of America’s largest banking institution, Jamie Dimon obsequiously issued a public apology for offending the CCP.  Pope Francis had no reservations about openly criticizing Donald Trump is silent about China’s Uygher concentration camps and did a secret deal that purportedly gave the CCP veto power over appointments in China.  University of Chicago’s John Mersheimer has a must read article, The Inevitable Rivalry  in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs and I highly recommend it.  All this will be very difficult, if not impossible to reverse.  Since allowing China to join the WTO, I would argue that we have become more like China, rather than the other way around.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-10-19/inevitable-rivalry-cold-war

Mass incarceration is a problem.

Yes, we have been told that mass incarceration is a problem.  The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a lot of it is due to our draconian drug laws, which affect minorities disproportionately.  Because they are poorer and can’t afford bail, they are condemned to sitting in prison.   This has been drummed into us for a couple of decades.

Well, we loosened or eliminated drug laws, went to cashless bail, and, in cities like Chicago, dramatically raised the standards for prosecution.   We are seeing the results of all this with the flow of blood on city streets and the ravaging of a retail industry by looters—an industry that is already reeling because of Amazon and COVID.

As with China, it turns out that mass incarceration was the solution, not the problem.  And this doesn’t mean harsh prison sentences for minor drug offenses.  This means keeping dangerous felons away from productive members of society.    I tweeted this comment:

“Exploring the ‘root causes’ is a useless academic debate and focuses on the needs of the perpetrator sometime off in the future, if ever, rather than the innocent victims today.”

Meanwhile, population will just bleed off, literally and figuratively.”

Ironically, it is the black community in places like Chicago that are bearing most of the suffering due to the propagation of this myth.

Immigration is an unalloyed positive for the country.

Our country needs immigration and I am hardly anti-immigrant, having been reared in a largely immigrant community. Yet, a sane immigration policy would take into account the needs of the country.  There are only 3 squares an immigrant can land on upon arrival:

1.      Employed, self sufficient and productive.

2.      The social welfare system.

3.      The criminal justice system.

That’s it.  We want lots of people on square number one.   We have plenty in squares 2 and 3 already, thank you very much.  A sane policy would filter out as many individuals likely to occupy squares 2 and 3 as possible.

Other factors which make unfettered immigration undesirable is that the demand for unskilled labor is projected to decrease in the future.  We simply do not need lots of people with strong backs and nothing else to bring to the table as we did a century ago.   Yet another problem is that our school systems and other institutions have gone Woke, which means that rather than being fully integrated into our society, new immigrants, particularly those of color, are being told that they are oppressed.  This is not good for a cohesive society.

Sticking blindly to these myths have wreaked tremendous damage to our nation and both Republicans and Democrats share blame for peddling them, along with the so-called “experts.”  We need to make adjustments to them and make them sooner, rather than later.   It’s past time to change course.