The Terrible Threes

 Tyrants of all kinds LOVE slogans—the more vacuous and innocuous sounding the better.  They are meant to be devoid of real meaning, or to camouflage precisely where they are taking society.  Most often, the actual results are the exact opposite of the slogan’s purported aspirations.  The Bolshevik’s “Peace, Land, and Bread,” gave them war, an invasion by the Germans and mass starvation.  Likewise, Mao’s “Serve the People” and the “Great Leap Forward,” resulted in 36-45 million deaths.  And we all know where the infamous “Abreit Macht Frei” went.

And here we are once again, subject to an onslaught of slogans.  But this time, it’s from within.   The slogans and messaging are back, in an effort to reshape society.  But this time, they are being broadcast in the West, in an effort to reshape free societies into something different.  Once again, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, and the Nazis, they are the propaganda tools of the central planners.  It’s scary stuff, and scarier still that today’s central planners have a propaganda reach to be able to manipulate the population through social media that the Bolsheviks, Maoists and Nazis could only dream of. 

Build Back Better
The alliteration rolled off the tongues of all the Western leaders from Macron to Biden to Merkel to Boris Johnson.  It seemed to gain traction after the horrendous policy decisions to shut down Western societies in response to the COVID pandemic.  And it sounded great, especially in America, where we thrive on innovation, fresh starts and renewal.   But it never answered fundamental questions.  Who was going to do the building?  What, exactly was being built?  With what money?  A high speed rail like the one in California that cost millions with not an inch of track being laid?   Millions of electric cars with no infrastructure to service them?  

Social Emotional Learning
SEL is marketed as a way of developing emotional control, empathy and facilitates students “feeling and showing empathy toward others” and establishing “equitable learning environments.” It can help “address various forms of inequity.”  All of this sounds nice.  Who isn’t FOR empathy?  But the more you read about SEL, the more you realize that this is simply the State elbowing its way into the space that should be occupied by family and church.  It is state education sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.  It's the role of parents and pastors to form identities and teach empathy and cooperation.  SEL is simply an academic sounding slogan to displace family and faith and substitute the state.

Environmental, Social and Governance
Like SEL, ESG is being applied to corporations and states.  And like SEL, it’s hard to argue against.  Who doesn’t want companies and sovereignties to be environmentally aware?  Who can be against the health and safety of employees?  ESG is deliberately formulated to be a direct counter to Milton Friedman’s theory that a firm exists primarily to satisfy its shareholders.   Like SEL, ESG exists to promote an agenda.  It assigns a score to companies and sovereignties WITHOUT REGARD TO FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE.   It ignores an essential truism of economics and of life itself—that all problems involve tradeoffs, constraints and boundaries.  Further, all of the issues that ESG purportedly is set up to address are amply dealt with in federal law, various state laws, and administrative bodies.  It is highly duplicative of the EPA, Department of Labor, EEOC, the SEC and various state corporate laws.

Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness
CRT and DEI and their corrosive effects on higher education, corporate life and society in general have been amply written about by writers like James Lindsey, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson and others, and I will not attempt to regurgitate what they have said here.   All I will say on these topics is that, like ESG, they ignore actual performance as a measure of success. And both ignore the social good of social cohesiveness as an end in itself.   CRT and DEI have led to the diminution of standards across academia and corporate life, and in a host of other environments.  About the only place they have not corrupted is competitive chess.   Rankings are formulaic and color blind.  There are no diversity quota for grandmasters.  You either make the cut or you do not.  Period.

Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter was probably the most clever of the three word slogans.  It’s impossible to argue the converse.  But it is an inherently racist statement.  Black lives do, indeed, matter.  But so do white lives, Asian lives, Indian and Pakistani lives, Hispanic lives, and Indigenous lives.   Further, Black Lives Matter the organization was conflated with the notion that black lives matter.  And as we saw, Black Lives Matter was a scam, a shakedown of monumental proportions, that leveraged the death of George Floyd to enrich its founders like Patrice Cullors.  The organization collected millions, but bestowed nothing on HBCUs, or health organizations or anything else for that matter that actually enriched Black lives.

The three word slogans have become endemic in our society.  They are vacuous, antithetical to a democratic, capitalist society, and are leading to the degradation of standards, of innovation, and of excellence.  They are all deliberately designed to be difficult to argue against.  They are constructed in threes because that is easy to remember and impound But each is also designed to convey power to the State and to the central planners and will end with the Sovietization of America.

Terror on the 4th

 The first notices started popping up on Twitter mid-morning as I gathered my clubs to go to the driving range in Highland Park—active shooter at a 4^th of July parade.   It stopped me in my tracks and I ended up spending the day much like I did 21 years ago on 9/11, watching the news unfold, fielding phone calls from friends and exchanging messages with others.    As the perpetrator remained at large until early evening, much of the North Shore was shut down as a precaution. 

In certain respects, this was worse than 9/11 as I watched events unfold.  It was eerie to see news cameras pan around and all the sights were familiar.  I had just passed through the area the day before. And just like 9/11, I was glued to the news most of the day as 4^th of July activities got quashed.

By the end of the evening, three politicians—J.B. Pritzker, Tammy Duckworth and Lori Lightfoot all lined up to score political points, more or less reading the same talking points about “assault weapons,” even though Highland Park has the most comprehensive firearms restriction regimen in the country.  The ever Woke and politically compliant Cardinal Cupich dutifully parroted the message, which led me to consider whether we would have fewer of these instances if Cupich didn’t drive young people away from the Catholic faith.  This disgusting parade was followed by the eloquent Vice President’s appearance the next day, soothing the wounds of the mourning citizens of Highland Park to “seriously take this seriously.”   Pritzker’s and Lightfoot’s words of condolence drew ire from social media as their policies have created an environment in which 7 dead and 30 wounded in Chicago is just kind of an average weekend now.

But most troubling is a pattern that is emerging of mass killings with unexplained loose ends, and missed opportunities.  Robert Crimo had painted a disturbing image of a person holding a rifle on his mother’s wall.  After threatening to kill his family, police took away his knifes and a sword and yet he was still able to obtain a FOID card (which his father co-sponsored).  Most puzzling is that his father, while under investigation, has been blathering all over the press, explicitly saying he had no regrets for co-signing his FOID application, saying that he had had a conversation the night before the shooting in which they discussed mass shootings, and said his son had “good morals.”  Also, Crimo’s social media posts show him in Antifa-like garb, and there was an Antifa gathering in nearby Wilmette a few days before.

Another unexplained piece of this was a witness who stated that he saw a shooter on the ground in a “military style crouch,” a male with a backpack and that he “looked into his eyes.”  This seems at variance with the fact that Crimo was in a dress shooting from a rooftop.

Like Uvalde, there are lots of unanswered questions.  The Uvalde police inexplicable did not follow modern doctrine and training and permitted the shooter to carry on without interference.  The police actually blocked individuals from attacking the attacker.  We also don’t have answers as to where this kid got $5,000 or so to purchase two top of the line AR-15s, ammo and a vest.

The Uvalde, Highland Park and the Waukesha attacks purposefully focused on families and children.  In all three cases, the perpetrators had a pretty clear trail of disturbing behavior.

The question is how are these attacks linked.  Were they lone wolves?  Is this a manifestation of COVID lockdown madness? Are they part of some sort of network, even a loose one like Islamic terrorists that draw inspiration from others?   Or is something more sinister going on?  The unanswered questions leave open the latter possibilities.

 

My Reaction to the Reactions

 Almost two months after the leak of the draft of Alito’s majority opinion, the Dobbs decision was finally released on Friday, overturning Roe v. Wade.  I have not yet read the entire opinion, although the hefty opinion and the dissents sit at the edge of my desk in my “to be read” pile.

The final decision has triggered the expected response in the usual places.   Nancy Pelosi was so angered that she was almost incoherent and her earring fell off at the end of her statement.  Barack Obama, with no small irony, commented “[the decision] relegated the most intensely  personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues.”  *cough**cough*  The ever eloquent and inspirational Kamala Harris reacted by stating “we are guided by what we see that can be, unburdened by what has been.”  Ms. Harris apparently has been unburdened by any serious Constitutional scholarship.  The Vatican did release a statement, but also took the opportunity to say that being “pro-life means defending life against the threat of firearms.”  The Woke Pope himself, who tweets daily about climate change and immigration, has been pretty quiet about an issue that has been central to Catholic beliefs for a long, long time.  And from the radical Left, the reaction has been an entirely predictable temper tantrum.  Lost in all this is that a Missourian just needs to fill up the car and drive across the  border to Illinois where she will be welcomed into the Abortion Mecca of the Midwest with open arms by our ever health focused governor J.B. Pritzker (Body Mass Index approaching infinity), a drive that would be less expensive had Joe Biden not won the presidency.    And Woke corporations like JP Morgan Chase are tripping over themselves to underwrite abortion transportation costs in the name of women’s rights  (“If you could be back at your desk taking calls by lunchtime, that would be great, Nancy.   We’re here for you.”).   None of that messy, inconvenient maternity leave and post-birth time on the phone coordinating with nannies, doctor’s appointments,  parent-teacher conferences and all that for the progressive, beneficent Mr. Dimon.  We have shareholders to please.  The cost/benefit is pretty clear.  A couple thousand bucks of travel expenses is a real bargain to limit the lost productivity that children cause.

For me, the most curious reactions came on LinkedIn, and as a result, I have begun the practice of “de-networking,” that is, trimming contacts from LinkedIn that use the platform as a place to make political statements.   In my view, LinkedIn is a platform to make and maintain professional connections and to view someone’s background, and is a job search engine.  LinkedIn is usually the first stop for most headhunters and employers.

I have begun to actually trim contacts.  It began with people putting pronouns in their bios.  I figured that if I don’t know you well enough to know what sex you are,  it is highly unlikely that I will know you well enough to do any business with.   Pronouns in the bio earn an automatic deletion from my contact list.

Similarly, I deleted a number of contacts after the 2020 election that posted gushing comments about Kamala Harris breaking the glass ceiling.  Harris, who didn’t earn a single delegate in the Democratic primaries, has broken nothing but the nation’s record for vacuous speeches and inappropriate cackling.  Mostly, I deleted these contacts because I apply The Iron Law of Reciprocity.  Not a single person dared post anything positive when Donald Trump won in 2016 on LinkedIn.   Likewise, not a single person had so far shown the courage to applaud Supreme Court's reasoning and adherence to the Constitution.  They wouldn't dare. They would be a social pariah if they did, and would be treated as if they had contracted professional leprosy.  But those that support Roe and express anger at Clarence Thomas are free to paste their views all over LinkedIn.   Most astonishingly, many of the supporters of Roe demonstrate in public their profound ignorance of what the Dobbs ruling actually says, which also says something about how one would analyze professional matters.

But since much of corporate America has incorporated progressive positions in their cultures, it is now permissible to publicly espouse them on public platforms.   For conservatives or libertarians, it is verboten to do so.  They must stay in the closet on political matters—you know, like gays used to have to.  I thought we were past that. I guess not.  We merely switched positions.

So I have been busy trimming contacts like I trim the bushes in the spring.  I refer to it as de-networking. One person actually boasted that he had lost 20 contacts due to his commentary on Dobbs that he posted on LinkedIn.  Delete.  Make that 21.   

But I did do something quite astonishing as a consequence of all this.  I sent a modest campaign contribution to a NY Democrat--  Maud Maron, running for the 10^th District in NY.  Yes, you read that correctly- a NY Democrat. Before you write me off as having completely lost all of my marbles, I reprint her response to Dobbs in its entirety here:

I fully support the legal right of a woman to choose whether to have a child or an abortion, and believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare.

The Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade should not be a cause for panic—especially in New York State where access to abortion is protected by State Law.  The issue now lies with our democratic process; and laws will differ in different states.  We should strive to resolve our differences on this deeply emotional question through reason, not rage.

The federal government should support funding for abortion where it is legal in the states.  Congress should also make sure that states do not interfere with interstate travel to obtain legal abortions.

This is an opportunity for Americans to solve a difficult problem together through debate and compromise.  Let’s take it.

I was so thoroughly impressed by her measured and thoughtful response that I was compelled to send her a contribution and mention her on social media.   While many on the left were firing up flamethrowers and too many on the right were smugly gloating, Ms. Maron’s response was the most eloquent that I have seen expressed so far.  What really caught my attention was what Ms. Maron did NOT do.  She did not assail the Court or its decision.  Her response suggests that she is respectful of the Constitution and the separation of powers.  She advocated a democratic process and debate and compromise.  Plagiarizing a slogan from the Clinton campaign—I’m with her. 

I undoubtedly have some policy differences with Ms. Maud.  And that's OK.  She's a Democrat.  I've generally hewed more closely to Republican positions.  But her enlightened and reasoned response to Dobbs demonstrated the limits of partisanship.  Ironically, out of a highly divisive issue about which people occupy hardened positions, I find myself fully behind a Democrat.  Go figure.  I will be following her closely, and I encourage my readers to support her candidacy.  We need more like her from both parties in Congress.

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.