Black lives matter

 But so does Black behavior.

I detest writing about race, because I do not see people that way.  Skin pigmentation, being an immutable characteristic, is as relevant to me as any other—eye color, hair color, height, etc.  It really means nothing to me and does not govern how I relate to another person at all.  That is the MLK credo.  But in the world in which the preachings of Ibram X. Kendi surpass Martin Luther King, banishing skin color to irrelevancy is not enough.

But there is a topic that must be talked about, openly and honestly, if we are to regain our place as a civil society.  We can’t duck it or hide from it.  We have to ask questions that many are afraid to ask because of the fear of being labeled or canceled.   But facts are facts. 

The issue is the predominance of Black violence.

The Left for years talked about “disparate impact,” a concept that made its way into our judicial and administrative system of governance.  Disparate impact was the idea that certain practices were not discriminatory on their face but disproportionately adversely affected a certain group—generally African Americans.  This concept was applied in a variety of discrimination cases.

Just as Lionel Shriver’s masterful novel We Need to Talk About Kevin addressed American violence generally and critiqued middle America’s complacency and lifestyle, we now need to talk about black violence.

The facts are stark.  Thirteen percent of the population commits 50% of the violent crime.  The numbers are even worse when you consider that the vast majority of those are committed by black males between the ages of 16 and 40.   And since major urban areas have elected progressive prosecutors, defunded the police and enacted “criminal justice reform,”  murders, assaults, armed robberies and assaults have spiked across the country.  And that’s just the crime that gets reported.  Other incidents, like the horrifying terror inflicted upon an older couple by a flash mob while they were trapped in their vehicle as youths mobbed the car and jumped on it, threatening and terrorizing them, don’t even get reported.  Twitter has been unable to block all of the brawls in airports, fast food restaurants, and hotel lobbies, a vastly disproportionate number involve African Americans.   Chicago had 1800 carjackings in 2021, and so far 2022 is on pace to eclipse that total.  Almost all of them have been committed by African Americans.   Whites, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians together make up a fraction of those crimes.

Just as we talked about disparate impact, we need to put disparate black violence on the table and talk about it.  It is turning our magnificent cities into dystopian hell holes, which are being increasingly being abandoned by law abiding citizens and businesses.  It is true that 80% or so of the violence by blacks is directed at other blacks.  But this is meaningless.  It is destroying the black community and prompting me to ask why, as a white person, do I seem to care more about the slaughter of black children in Chicago than Chicago’s black political leadership?

We can’t begin to make progress in solving the problem until we can ask the question of why?

Most whites are prohibited from asking the question for fear of being labeled racist.   Few blacks will address it honestly.  Shemeeka Michelle has addressed black violence.   So has Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (this recent podcast addresses it squarely and I highly recommend it. 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vPhfM372Ju2GfdtCATFir

But they are the minority of a minority. Economist Steven Leavitt attempted to explain Black violent crime by citing Roe v. Wade.  He came under attack by both the left and right for asserting that the violent crime rate was a demographic issue and had decreased because fewer unwanted children were being born as a result of Roe.  But we have had a decrease in birth rates and the Roe hypothesis certainly looks shakier as crime rates spike.

I would argue that Black violence is actually worse that Loury portrays it.  Black violence is not exclusively confined to lower class black young men.  We have seen Black women engaged in horrible melees and as participants in flash mobs.

The violence is not limited to lower classes, either.  Police were summoned to the home of Cook County DA Kim Foxx's home after she apparently had a physical confrontation with her husband.  Two of Michael Jordan's sons--Jeffrey and Marcus--were arrested after physical confrontations with law enforcement.  These two young men grew up in opulence and in one of Chicago's wealthiest suburbs.  And then there was the very public battery by Will Smith of Chris Rock.   Resorting to physical violence is not limited to the "marginalized" in Black society; violence seems to reach the very to echelons of the Black community.

It is not racist to ask what is going on.  If we care about people, if we care about the progress of African Americans, particularly African American children, we cannot be afraid to ask why.  Indeed, responsible citizenry demands that we do.

A subset of the problem of Black violence is the feral Black youth.  The murderers of Tessa Majors, and the UberEats driver in DC were in their teens as are a predominant number of carjackers in Chicago.  What is to become of these youthful criminals?  What are we to do with them?  The murderer of Tessa Majors received a sentence of 18 months of "detention."  What will likely become of him?  Can he be reformed and rehabilitated?  How did he get to be a soulless murderer in the first place?  Judge Tim Evans, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook  County in Illinois has stated that those children under 16 cannot tell right from wrong.  Is that really the case?

The radical Left has attempted to frame this up as a white supremacist problem. The statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the Black violence problem vastly overwhelms any contribution of purported white supremacy.  And it is Black society itself that is bearing much of the suffering from this pathology.

Platitudinous answers like, "It's a cultural issue," or "It's a legacy of slavery," or, worse, "It's genetic" are all unsatisfactory answers.  Most insulting was Mark Milley's absurd comment about needing to understand "white rage."  It's not the white population that is disproportionately exhibiting rage.

Most of us have been socialized to have violence inhibitors kick in.  In our day to day lives, most people find a way to supress their violent urges.  Most of us figure out how to block the urge to smack a co-worker in a meeting even when they are exasperating to us.  We do not slap our spouses when they enrage us.  We certainly do not physically resist law enforcement during a traffic stop, even when we feel we have been unjustly singled out.   Why do Black Americans, proportionately, do not seem to possess such disinhibitors?  Again, this says nothing about any individual, but only making observations of Blacks as a group.  We need to come to a fuller understanding of why this appears to be so, and discuss it in a frank and productive manner without  being labeled or canceled.

We must begin by not whitewashing the problem and certainly not lionizing criminals.  George Floyd's death was harmful to our society, but not in the way the MSM thinks.  Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin, true.  But the toxicology report conclusively showed that Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system to kill him-- and on its face a fact sufficient to nullify Chauvin's conviction base on a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.  Yet the MSM and certain segments of the public continue to view him as a religious martyr.  Statues were erected to him.  Murals have been painted in his honor.  Nancy Pelosi thanked Floyd for "sacrificing your life for justice."  A new biography of Floyed has been released and the New York Times Book Review gushed with praise for Floyd, describing him as "shy, contemplative and good natured" and blamed "growing up Black and poor" and "structural racism" for his outcome.  According to the author and reviewer, Floyd had no agency over his own life.  Nowhere did the review even mention Floyd's conviction and imprisonment for beating and threatening a pregnant woman with a gun.  And after his actions were so bad that he was put away for five years, Floyd apparently didn't learn anything from it.  George Floyd was no Rosa Parks.

It's not racist to put this issue on the table for discussion.  We need answers.  The peace and prosperity of our society and the progress and reduction of the income and wealth gap between black and white America depends on some answers.

Stealth Islamism

 We received our first bitter taste of Islamism in 2000, with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and, failing to respond forcefully to that attack, we received a devastating blow from radical Islam on 9/11/2001.

Since then, America has largely been successful in preventing an attack of the magnitude of 9/11, but Islamism isn’t done with us yet.  We may have prevented (so far) most of its violent manifestations here in America, but Its norms and practices are seeping in through the cracks and crevices of our society like a fog.  It has disguised itself and has begun to slip in surreptitiously.  And it has powerful allies inside our country.

Having just read new book The War on the West, it is abundantly clear that the West is under attack on several fronts—from China, Russia, and from Islamism.   China and Islamism, in particular, have been enormously successful in forging networks and alliances inside the U.S., particularly within the academic and political classes.

Islamism has gotten a foothold in Congress, following on the Islamist sympathies of the Obama Administration. The Squad got itself elected (with a little help from the Obama administration steering Somalis into a single district).  The anti-Semitism of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib wears the thinnest of veils and when Omar made blatant Jew hating remarks, the best the House could do was to pass a watered down resolution condemning hatred of all kinds.

It will be recalled that Obama pushed (and Biden is still attempting to restart) the JCPOA, which Trump killed and is being resurrected by the Biden administration.  The JCPOA will provide Iran with a direct path to the bomb.   After Trump facilitated the Abraham Accords, which historically allied some of the Arab nations with Israel to blunt the Islamist threat from Iran in the region.  By resurrecting JCPOA, and loosening sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration is kicking over the game board and empowering the most dangerous Islamist state in the region.  And remember, it was Obama who, after every terrorist incident across the globe, rushed to the podium to urge people not to “rush to judgment.”  And Obama was the only Western leader not to bother to make the trip to Europe in solidarity with other Western leaders after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Of course, there the matter of  leaving the Taliban with $80 billion of advanced US military hardware by cutting and running from Afghanistan last summer, providing weapons of war to the most backwards, most fundamentalist Islamist regime in the world.  It was quite a gift. 

But wait, there’s much more, and it’s stealthy and carries the odor of Islamism in our midst.

We have witnessed pathological movements over the past few years that raise significant issues.  Taken together, they raise the uncomfortable specter of Islamism’s tenets being adopted right here as cultural norms.

The face coverings were the first worrisome practice.   At first, they may have made sense because we didn’t know much about COVID.  But as time went on, we learned a couple of things.   Studies concluded that they were of little benefit.   Yet, politicians demanded that they continue to be used and teachers’ unions were the fiercest defenders of them, even though they imposed great impediments to learning, especially among younger children and children with special needs that need facial expressions and visualization of mouth movements to articulate words.  Face coverings are dehumanizing.   They deprive us of a significant facet of communication and prevent us from recognizing friends and allies.  They are STILL being required in NY schools and as cases rise, are being held over kids as a sword of Damocles in blue cities.

Second has been the development of the transgender movement.   Through the transgender movement, special protections for women have been removed.   Men that “identify” as women can compete in women’s sports, and in California, are allowed to be placed in women’s prisons.  The height of this absurdity has been the assertion that men can menstruate and have children.   What started as a movement for tolerance, the movement denigrates and erases women, leaves them vulnerable to abuse and most diabolically, attempts to contradict the thing that makes women so vital—only women can create and carry human life.

Third has been the sexualization of children.  I began to notice this with opinion pieces in the New York Times that suggested decriminalization of pedophilia and treating it like a sickness.  Then, we began to see the language play, with radical Leftists trying to water down the term pedophile to Minor Attracted Persons.  A couple of years ago, Drag Queen Story Hour became a feature in libraries across the country. The ball rolled downhill very quickly as Abigail Shrier raised the alarm about the transgender movement pushing at preadolescent girls with her book Irreversible Damage.  In some quarters, children are administered puberty blockers and are having gender reassignment surgery before adulthood.  And now we are in a full blown culture war with some school districts and Woke corporations like Disney, Mattel and State Farm behind exposing young children to matters of sexuality at a very young age.  The California legislature is not considering stripping away an important protective guard rail and impediment to pedophilia by allowing a defendant to assert that he or she “reasonably believed the child to be of the age of consent” which effectively means that, if enacted, it will be very difficult to convict these predators.  The Biden open border policy is a tacit acceptance of the child sex trafficking that is going on as a result right under our noses.

It will be recalled that the Obama administration’s official policy was to instruct soldiers to “look the other way” when Afghan soldiers and police sexually abused children and the State Department had a quandary when Afghan refugees brought their child brides with them to the states.  ISIS was infamous for having underage girls as sex slaves.  

So let’s add all this up and take stock.  We have a requirement for face coverings (even in the absence of a rational reason for them).  Check.  Degradation of women.  Check. Sexualization of children.  Check.  Genital mutilation. Check.

Gee, all of this is starting to look pretty Taliban-y to me.  The most abhorrent and revolting aspects of radical Islam are beginning to show up in our society under the guise of something else.  We are normalizing and accepting face coverings, the degradation of women, genital mutilation and the sexualization of children.  They may call them something different or assert a different purpose. Gender affirming surgery rather than genital mutilation.  Trans rights rather than degradation of women.  Face coverings to “slow the spread.”  But these are Islamist societal norms and practices and must be rejected in all their forms.   We must not let these practices take root here.

We've Sprung Leaks

 The chaotic state of affairs we find ourselves in at the moment would not be that difficult to solve, but it will take a yeoman’s effort to tighten things up.

Lots of commentators are ruminating about how America has lost its way and what, if anything, can be done to fix it.   Fixing the leaks would go a long way towards a solution.   A little duct tape and spackle in our institutions would work wonder.   It comes down to accountability—financially and otherwise.

Ukraine aid. 

 Rand Paul voted no on the aid package to Ukraine, and held it up for awhile even though he came under fire for doing so.  He didn’t oppose the aid.  What he opposed was $40 billion of our money being sent over with no oversight.   All he wanted was an inspector general to account for the spending.   It’s almost as if we learned nothing from the wasted billions in Afghanistan.   Unaccounted for funds tend to end up in peoples’ pockets.   Rand’s request was reasonable and sensible.  His colleagues mostly were having none of it.  This money will vanish down a rabbit hole.

BLM

And speaking of unaccounted for funds flowing into someone else’s pockets, there is Patrice Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter.  With millions flowing in to its coffers from individual and corporate donations, you would think that a number of HBCU’s would have endowed professorships, new building and scholarship funds.  New health care centers would be popping up in Chicago, New York and Atlanta.   Early childhood development centers would be springing up in inner city Philadelphia.

Well, actually, none of that happened.  We heard of no signature projects that actually helped black people.  What we did hear of are the mansions Ms.  Cullors purchased, the lavish parties she threw, the thousands she took out and thousands more that found their way into the pockets of Cullors’s squeeze and her brother.

Shame also on the corporations that wasted these donations on BLM, bypassing the usual vetting and accountability that goes with corporate giving.  Usually, charities have to make a case for the gift solicitation, and develop a proposal that shows exactly what the money will be used for and often keep the donor advised as to progress.  In the post- George Floyd frenzy, however, corporations simply wired money to BLM (a form of protection money?) with no accountability whatsoever.  Shame on them.

Gov’t money

The COVID “stimulus” money was shoveled out faster than they could print it (so now we have 8.5% inflation).  And state and local governments marinated in the largesse.   Illinois and Chicago were pretty typical.  COVID funds were diverted to favored political allies.  No budget reforms were enacted.  Illinois was able to get a credit rating upgrade without enacting a single budget reform. 

Most egregiously, both Mayor Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker sent millions to NGO’s for crime prevention and “violence interrupters”  without any accounting of exactly where these funds were going or any measure of the efficacy of the programs.  We have a pretty good idea of how well this is going with 4 mass shootings in the past week or so.  We also learned that some of these “violence interrupters” on the payroll of these community groups are themselves gang members.

Supreme Court leak.

Of course, the biggest leak lately was the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion purportedly overturning Roe.  Justice Clarence Thomas has asserted that it will change the nature of the Court, as judges will no longer be able to trust their clerks, or the process.  Several weeks on, we still don’t know who the leaker was, even though the number of possible suspects is quite  limited.   We also need to know who this person had connections with and whether he or she acted alone.

Like the Nashville bombing and the Las Vegas shooter, I suspect we may never get to the bottom of this.

The Vote

Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules documents the “ballot stuffing” that went on during the 2020 election with a strong inference that the deficiencies in the system (along with data analysis and video evidence of ballot box stuffing) were enough to tip the election in Biden’s favor.  While actual fraud is difficult to prove, enough questions were raised to question the outcome.  As with the Supreme Court leak, we not only need to have faith in the outcome, but we need to have faith in the process.

Grifting and corruption can be stopped.  Our institutions can be cleaned up.  But we need accountability, transparence and a restored faith in the process.   We need to stop the leaks.

What Republicans Got Wrong

 The original intent of this blog was to produce conservative and libertarian thought pieces with a bit of an original twist.  As I saw Reagan conservative losing steam with the passing of Reagan and William F. Buckley, it was my intent to write pieces that refreshed conservatism and libertarianism, and to do so in an interesting way.

To do that necessarily means that I would have to bring things current, to match the era.  The problems facing Reagan’s America are different than the problems we face today.  Second, I would have to critically analyze some of the things that conservatives and libertarians got wrong.   Both parts are necessary so that one does not simply become a tired, old, ossified ideological crank, yearning for some long past golden era.  How boring.

Today, I’m going to lay out the principal things that I believe conservative Republicans got wrong, and we’ve all paid a terrible price as a result.

Assuming trade would moderate China.
John Mersheimer is a controversial speaker and writer, but in his Foreign Affairs Essay, he wrote:

Beguiled by misguided theories about liberalism’s inevitable triumph and the obsolescence of great-power conflict, both Democratic and Republican administrations pursued a policy of engagement, which sought to help China grow richer.  Washington promoted investment in China and welcomed the country into the global trading system, thinking it would become a peace-loving democracy and a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led international order.  Of course, this fantasy never materialized.

It was a horrible mistake, and one some of our brightest minds sold to us (hence, my skepticism about the judgment of “experts”).    As recently as four years ago, Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama was touting this line, that a middle class would bubble up in China, demand more freedoms and the CCP would have no choice but to grant them.  The Becker-Friedman Center at The University of Chicago is STILL having its China Biweekly Seminar on Public Economics, and Chicago Booth STILL has a Hong Kong campus, despite the brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, the internment of the Uhgyers, threating Taiwan, and the obfuscation of the origins of COVID.   What more evidence do you need to convince you that all of their basic premises about China were dead wrong?  They all acted as if Tiananmen Square never happened.  As long as cheap goods flowed into the Western companies, and Chinese students paying full sticker price at universities, they all refused to see what was happening—China was becoming a major geo-political rival, and instead of China becoming more like us, our society was becoming more like theirs.

Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.
Among other blunders of the George W. Bush administration was this pithy slogan.  While the U.S. was justified in a response to 9/11, our goals never critically evaluated and the net outcome was trillions added to our national balance sheet, expanded influence of Iran in the Middle East, thousands of needless deaths in Iraq, an expensive 20 year fiasco in Afghanistan that culminated in turning the keys back over to the Taliban and arming them with $80  billion in advanced U.S. weaponry.

Not only did these misadventures divert resources from a military that badly needs to be upgraded (our navy needs 50 more ships and our nuclear forces need serious modernizing), we gave our adversaries a free look at our command structure, our tactics and our technology. 

Foreign intervention by platitude was among the worst blunders by the conservative establishment.  Interestingly, the maverick Republicans—Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were very judicious and surgical in the application of military force.

My contrarian view is that the spectacular success of the 1991 Gulf War harmed the U.S.   Wiping out the world’s 3^rd largest army in 100 days created an air of hubris and invincibility that led to some very bad decisions later on.

CEO pay
As CEO pay reached the stratosphere, proponents of the free market like Steven Kaplan at The University of Chicago cheered it on, claiming that these executives are a rare breed and are like free agent athletes and should be able to garner these incredible pay packages.   CEO pay is now  299 times more than the average worker.

Advocates like Kaplan failed to take into account the corrosive effects on society these packages would have on our society.   CEO pay has ballooned $1,332% since 1978.  These executives live in rarified, gated communities completely segregated from the workers that they supposedly “lead” leading to what Charles Murray called “unseemliness.”  I don’t mind people getting wealthy when they actually create value and take on rise, but most of these arrangements limit their downside risk.  The CEO of Boeing walked away with $60 million even after the 737 Max killed two planeloads of people.   Few companies have instituted or exercised clawbacks after spectacular failures.

While it is consistent with free market principles, the  pay extravagance has become, according to Charles Murry, “unseemly” and corrosive to social cohesiveness.  The book “Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town” documented how private equity firms pillaged Anchor Hocking, and left the company and the town an empty shell.  That book, more than anything began to nudge me to evolve my views.

Focus on tax cuts and judicial appointments

Republicans put their sole focus on tax cuts and judicial appointments.  While those priorities were important, they completely neglected two others—the Administrative State and local politics, particularly school boards.   The radical Left seized upon that, and as a result, we have and IRS, FBI and DHS that have become enforcement arms of the DNC.  We have a CDC that is not only obscuring and misrepresenting data, it is making proclamations that de facto have the force of law.  And we have local school boards pushing the transgender agenda and CRT.  It will take a generation to reverse all this.

There are more stumbles, of course.  Republicans misunderstood how determined the radical Left was to manipulate and violate the rules to gain and keep power.   They falsely believed that the radical Left wanted to maintain a viable, democratic, two-party system.  They want nothing of the sort.  I have yet to see definitive signs (other than a few like DiSantis) that they have awoken from their slumber.

Podcasts: Sticking to Your Ideals, Not Ideology

 

Last week, I wrote about my personal experience with social media.  While there have been benefits to its emergence, there are so many aspects of it that have been destructive to society and that have contributed to the polarization: mobs, doxxing, censorship, trolling, and the undue influence on our electoral system both by shadow banning and other algorithmic influencing and, in Zuckerberg’s case, direct meddling in the election.

I also worry a great deal about being siloed, about being insulated from divergent points of view. By  following people that think exactly the way we do, to garner more “likes” that make us feel smart and witty, like Pavlov’s dog, I worry about becoming intellectually ossified.  Much of our intellectual growth comes from being challenged by facts and evidence and supported arguments that counter our views.  Making one uncomfortable and erasing one’s smugness is often the best favor someone can bestow upon you.

Douglas Murray’s latest column in the Spectator, “The art of changing your mind” was perfectly timed to address some of my concerns.  (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-changing-your-mind).  I have often thought of John Maynard Keynes’s famous response when a critic accused him of being inconsistent, “When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?”

Which brings me around to podcasts.  While social media has generally operated to harden us into tribes, created mobs, and often has permitted people to demonstrate some of their most impulsive and darker aspects of their personalities, podcasts have been, in my view, like throwing open a window on the first delightful spring day.   Of the millions of tweets posted each day, I highly doubt that anyone has been persuaded to alter their views on anything as a result.  But podcasts are different.  They are a happy development in a world of media propagandizing, trolling, doxxing, and impulsivity.

If you are intellectually curious, podcasts accomplish a number of positive things.  Most importantly, they allow for discourse that is more complex and nuanced than you can possibly get on legacy media OR social media.  On legacy media, segments are 7-10 minutes long, at most.  Twitter is even worse.  At 160 characters, it is impossible to put together a coherent view supported by facts, which is why most of these exchanges involve uniformed opinions, often with snarky, equally uniformed retorts.  The forced brevity facilitates polarization and we sometimes see otherwise  public intellectuals with some level of expertise spitting at each other like schoolyard children.  They allow a longer, more informed discussion and back and forth than is available on other platforms.

Podcasts allow for respectful discourse and exchange of views, especially if the podcaster is open-minded.  Joe Rogan is one.  Bari Weiss’s Honestly is another.   Bret Weinstein has also entertained lengthy discussions with individuals that have perspectives that are quite different than his.   These discussions have allowed me to rethink and reframe issues.   I often come away from some of these podcasts thinking, “Gee, I never thought about that in quite that way.”   It is healthy, and necessary if you are serious about reaching the truth of a matter.

Secondly, because of their length, podcasts reveal much more about the podcasters personalities.  We see the tartness and “mother bear” instincts of Megyn Kelly, the natural intelligence and inquisitiveness of Bari Weiss, and the wisdom and deep historical perspective of Victor Davis Hanson.  Glenn Loury has revealed much about his personal life, his highly indirect route to becoming a public intellectual, a route that took him through the ‘hood and rehab—it adds to his genuineness and humanity.

To be sure, there are drawbacks.  Legacy media constrains broadcasters to 30 or 60 minute segments.  The podcasters can go on for much too long, and sometimes take weird detours.  Good writers have good editors that keep them disciplined.   Podcasters have no such constraints.  James Lindsey’s New Discourses podcasts, for instance, can run for 2 hours or more, much longer than my attention span.  Tighten it up.

In a world of acute hyperpartisanship, I am making an earnest effort to both ignore pure propaganda, especially of the Woke kind, but at the same time, I am seeking out media outlets that foster honest and open-minded diversity of views.  While rejecting Wokeness in its entirety, I also do not want to get trapped in an intellectual cul-de-sac.  That can be as poisonous to one’s mind as buying the propaganda grist. 

Some of my favorite podcasts?   The Dark Horse Podcast with environmental biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, New Discourses with James Lindsey, The Glenn Show with Glenn Loury (especially when he has conversations with John McWhorter—the  “Black Guys”), The Saad Truth with Gad Saad, and, of course, the two best interviewers in media Bari Weiss on Honestly and Megyn Kelly on The Megyn Kelly Show.   The Victor Davis Hanson Show is a weekly staple for me.

It is no small irony that, as someone who has spent much of his adult life as a Reagan Republican, I find that when it gets right down to it, the most interesting people and people with real insights in this new media are traditional liberals- Bret Weinstein, Bari Weiss and Abigail Shrier.   The first step to ending the emerging tribalism is to recognize the common ground you have with the people from other tribes.  Podcasts help get you there.

Social Media- A Personal Assessment

 Writing is a humbling activity.  Writing for public consumption over time is even more humbling.  You expose yourself to others, allowing them to see your reasoning, your intellect, and your ability to organize and convey an argument.  But even worse, you expose yourself to being wrong, irrefutably wrong in your judgments, especially if someone drags out your old essays that widely missed the mark.

So, I have to ‘fess up.

A few years ago, I wrote a post extolling the virtues of Facebook.  Among other benefits, I mistakenly claimed it was free to the user (It’s not, you pay dearly with your personal data, and, probably, your mental health).  Tongue firmly planted in cheek, I also claimed that the real benefit was to be able to stay current and connected with your dysfunctional family and not actually have to be there.  But it seems that, despite my training,  I vastly underestimated the hidden costs of social media was exacting on our Republic and our culture.   Bari Weiss’s interview with Jonathan Haidt is well worth listening to and I will not attempt to summarize it here  (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-the-past-10-years-of-american-life-have/id1570872415?i=1000557220618)  but it is noteworthy that within a few days of this interview, we learn that Elon Musk has launched a takeover bid for Twitter, causing a cacophony of wailing and howling the likes of which we haven’t heard since Donald Trump’s election in 2016.  We can only hope that the takeover attempt, whether successful or not, represents an inflection point and a curtailment of the excesses of these platforms.  The libertarians exclaimed, “It’s a free market.  Go start your own platform.”  That is very difficult but maybe if someone else buys one, the momentum will start to shift.

My post today is simply to provide a brief summary of my own experience and impressions of a few of the major platforms.  My thinking about them has evolved over the past few years, and so has my use of them.   And they have evolved, too, and mostly not in a positive direction.

Facebook
At first, I enjoyed Facebook.  It was a painless and easy way to keep up with family members and old classmates and teammates.  It afforded me an opportunity to reconnect with some people that I had lost contact with.  The absolute best part was reconnecting with an old boyhood friend with whom I had spent several wonderful summers trouncing around the woods and fields of rural Wisconsin during the summer as little boys.  More than fifty years later, we got together and seamlessly picked up our friendship, memories and connections.  Without Facebook, this would likely not have occurred.

But then I saw the dark side of Facebook.  The frame-up of the Covington kids in 2019 was a turning point for me.  Posts which depicted a smug teen harassing this poor Native American veteran turned out to be a complete and utter falsehood and misrepresentation.  Worse, I saw posts of people I knew become part of a mob that was ready to pillory young Nicholas Sandmann in the public square.  It was my first hand experience with a social media mob with participants that were known to me.  Then came the Zuckerberg involvement in the 2020 presidential election, which undoubtedly influenced the election and the banning of Donald Trump just days after Michelle Obama called upon Zuckerberg to boot him.   I decided that I would no longer be part of this empire and deleted my account late last year.

Twitter
I have waivered on Twitter.  I have many of the same reservations about Twitter as I had with Facebook.  The abrogation of free speech principles by de-platforming of people whose views don’t conform to Twitter orthodoxy.  The Twitter mobs that destroyed people’s lives and careers.  The ugly exchanges between people that reflect poorly on them that exposed their underlying hubris and nastiness.  The personal attacks by Nassim Taleb on Cliff Asness and by Claire Lehmann on Bret Weinstein have colored my views of Taleb and Lehmann.   I have seen others say things on Twitter that they would never dare to say to a person’s face.   And then there is whole matter of  the shield of anonymity, as went coward Mitt Romney went under the Twitter alias Pierre Delecto.  Twitter also permits reckless impulsivity.  If we are honest with ourselves, most of us can think of instances when we ripped off a tweet that put our own thoughtlessness out there for the world to see, and almost immediately regretted it.  I’m amazed that even more people have not had their careers ruined and reputations sullied with self-destructive tweets.  Many of us have to work hard at not looking empty-headed and banal from time to time.  Twitter invites it.

Still, I have not disengaged.   I get some of my news from Twitter and over time, I learned who is reliable and who is not.  Despite its filtering, you do see some thing that would never get through the MSM.  And then there is the humor.  There are some truly funny people that sometimes tweet spit-up-your coffee comments.  I have also made some good relationships through Twitter—a few overseas, including a young man in Venezuela with whom I correspond.  In the old days, we would call them pen pals.  I reconnected with one of my college professors through Twitter and that has been an enriching experience. But I worry about two things.  First, I am concerned that Twitter in the age of COVID is being relied upon too heavily as a substitute social life.  As Kindle does for reading, Twitterverse is  inadequate for experiencing the fullness and rich texture and complexity of human interaction.  One cannot see the facial expressions of the other person, touch them, and cannot build memories with them.  It's quite antiseptic.  I have a few Italian friends that would be stymied.  They simply cannot communicate effectively unless their arm is around you and their nose is inches from your face. Second, I am worried about becoming siloed, about only being exposed to points of view that conform to my own and about being manipulated by the algorithms.   I also worry that its rapid-fire feeds are eating away at my powers of concentration.  There are days when it depresses me, as it seems that I am watching Western Civilization collapse in real time.   Depending on the outcome with Elon Musk’s run at it, the answer is probably to severely reduce my time and interaction with it.

LinkedIn
I reserve my harshest comments for LinkedIn.  It is the platform with which I have the least amount of engagement and whose feed has the least interesting content.  If it was not a sine qua non of modern professional life, I would delete my profile as I did with Facebook.  Posts are generally benign and vacuous.   They tend to fall in four categories.   First is the brown nose post, announcing to the world how wonderful your organization is and how blessed you feel to be part of the team (gag!).   Since I know many of these posters personally, I know this to be untrue.  The second type is the congratulatory one on a promotion or job move.   Third, is the virtue-signaling type—posting about a mentally challenged person that accomplished something, or how they assisted a women’s shelter or something else along those lines, announcing to the world what an empathetic, caring image they wish to project, rather than the ruthless, cutthroat capitalists they really are (many would happily trample right over that mentally challenged person if he stood in the way of a profitable sale).   Remember, some of these folks are known to me.  

Much is made of “networking” in business.  LinkedIn has gotten me started on de-networking, and I reserve that for the people that post the fourth type—political.  Political posts have no place on LinkedIn and it is made worse by the lack of reciprocity.  The same people that gushed about Kamala breaking the glass ceiling even though she cannot put two coherent sentences together would shriek in horror if you posted ANYTHING positive about Donald Trump or Mike Pence.  Political posters get immediately bounced off my LinkedIn feed, either by muting or disconnecting entirely.  So there.  Flick them off like a bug off your shoulder.

My thinking on social media will likely evolve and the platforms will likely evolve as well.  The emergence of podcasts and substack are another aspect of this but I will save that for another day.  The evidence is that the effect of these platforms on our society has darkened considerably in the last 4-5 years or so, and maybe if I reassess them in another few years, the essay will read quite differently.

One can only hope.

Mouse Trap

 I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years attempting to educate myself about the Woke movement.  I’ve read James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories, Gad Saad’s book, The Parasitic Mind, and Counter Wokecraft by Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay, and I have listened to Linday’s podcasts, as well as Bret Weinstein’s and Bari Weiss’s.  I have been taken aback by how quickly Wokeness has swept through the country.

The wildfire of Woke burning through academia and not-for-profits was not so surprising.  The professionals that inhabit these environments are sometimes  insulated and removed from the demands of the marketplace, at least in the short term.  Oberlin College could absorb a $31 million hit for waging a false campaign against the innocent bakery.  Harvard doesn’t give a passing thought to denting its elite status by admitting the supremely unqualified David Hogg.  Columbia University is fine with hiring radical Cathy Boudin, unrepentant murderer and member of the Weather Underground.  I suppose that their endowments are so large that in the cost/benefit analysis, these things actually enhance their brand by adding to their Woke bona fides.

But corporate America is different, or at least I thought so.  While there is some renewed debate over Milton Friedman’s assertion that the social responsibility of a business is to its shareholders, profit maximization mostly carries the day.  And as a practical matter, public companies remain under pressure to produce quarterly profits and please Wall Street.  For most companies, managing brand and image is an important aspect of that function.  They spent millions on trademark and copyright protection, promotion, focus groups, advertising, and on and on.   Even individuals will wage war to protect their brand.  A few years ago, Michael Jordan won a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Dominic’s grocery chain for using his image on a simply flyer without permission.

But this week, we saw companies that were willing to do incredible damage to their brand while chasing the holy grail of Wokeness instead of profits.  As I write this, there are protests in front of Disney headquarters, the park is virtually empty and the Disney plus channel has lost over 350,000 subscribers, and the stock tanked, losing some $2.4 billion in value.  This inexplicable act of brand self-immolation arose because of Disney’s opposition to the Florida bill passed to stop the teaching of matters of sexuality (read: gender ideology) up to 3^rd  grade.  Tarred with the falsely titled “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the act correctly prohibits teachers from introducing these matters with children that are too young to handle them.   Disney has doubled down, vowing to put more gay and trans characters in their films.  Boycotts are being organized and Republicans are even talking about not renewing the copyright on Mickey Mouse.

As someone who has spent a career analyzing, financing and helping to salvage businesses, it has been difficult to comprehend a corporate decision to commit brand suicide.  It flies in the face of management guru Peter Drucker’s famous quote that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.”  Without even seeing any market research, we know that these actions will drive away a large swath of its core customer base—families with small children.

Sure, there have been other instances of bringing brands into Woke compliance—the removal of Aunt Jemimah, the Land O’ Lakes Indian woman, and the Cream of Wheat Chef.  The Land O’ Lakes action triggered a sarcastic response to the packaging which kept the wooded background, “Do they realize that, in an effort to be Woke, they removed the Indian but kept the land?” 

Of course, there was the NFL and Colin Kaepernick kneeling and Nike’s decision to halt the introduction of the Betsy Ross shoes (I immediately ordered a Betsy Ross flag patch and had it sewn over the “swoosh” emblem of my only Nike golf shirt).   But I assumed that the NFL decided that fans would drift back after some period of outrage.

Disney represents a real departure and aggressive implementation of Woke, going at the heart of its customer base.  Disney management is making a statement.  Its customers and shareholders are subordinate to Wokeness, and the most twisted and dark aspect of it-Milton Friedman and Peter Drucker be damned.

In the same week, GEICO insurance suffered a bloody nose when it used radical antisemite Linda Sarsour to promote its Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month Celebration.  Sarsour is so vile that the Women’s March disconnected from her.  GEICO reacted quickly to what I assume was a flurry of objections.  It’s one thing for the thoroughly Woke Ben & Jerry’s to use Sarsour to promote its products but GEICO kicked a hornet’s nest with her.  To its credit, GEICO cancelled her and the event and issued a public apology.  But it’s still very troubling that featuring Sarsour made it through GEICO’s marketing department.  It’s department is clever, innovative and has great brand recognition with its silly ads featuring the lizard.  Someone very senior in the GEICO organization thought it was a splendid idea to replace the lizard mascot with a snake.

I was not shocked when academia and other not-for-profits swallowed the Woke poison early.  They tend to be somewhat disconnected from the realities of the marketplace.   I even bought into the rationale of organizations like the NFL and Nike because their brand might have been strong enough to take a short term hit and still bounce back.  But the actions of Disney are quantitatively different.  It is incontrovertible evidence that companies are willing to sacrifice their shareholders and customers on the altar of Wokeness, and that it is not isolated.  It is significant that GEICO initially was prepared to associate with Linda Sarsour.   This tells us how powerful this movement is, and how we can no longer be passive in opposing it.