A Little Hope

 I will be converting my blog to substack shortly under the name Darkly Optimistic.  Over the past couple of years, my blog posts have been more darkly than optimistic, a sad reflection of the trough that we are in.

So I thought I’d spread just a little bit of optimism in my post this week.

I spent two week in Pinehurst, North Carolina and tried to limit my visits to social media, as working in downtown Chicago and living in a nearby suburb under Governor Pritzker can be quite taxing on the old mental health.   Even a short stay in a small town and periodic breaks from social media can have a salutary effect on a person.

While there seems to be a deluge of bad news for the last couple of years, even including talk of civil war and a national divorce, I did make a few observations while I was away from a large urban center that gave me some hope for the future, and I came away with one overriding thought:

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Here were my experiences:

I drove around North Carolina for two full weeks and not a single driver cut me off or gave me the middle finger.  This is a daily occurrence in Chicago.

Not a single homeless person rattled a cup in my face.  Not a single one was huddled in a doorway.   In Chicago, you can’t walk 3 blocks downtown without confronting one. 

Most interesting was attendance at church.   I was surprised by the attendance at late Sunday morning Mass.  The local parish church is fairly large and it was fairly full.   I also noted that there were a number of entire families, many of whom had 3 or 4 small children.  And nearly everyone was dressed up.  Very few people had on jeans or shorts.  Most women wore dresses.  Men had collared shirts.  Little boys had their hair combed with Brylcreem.   Three women wore veils.   For the first time in a long time, the phrase “your Sunday best” meant something.

The next day brought some beach time.  Again, there were many families with small children.  I was struck by the fathers, attentive to their wives, playing with their children, all of them fit.  One young man carried his two year old son on his shoulder, both in identical white beach shirts, sporting the same sunglasses, same facial expression, and same facial features.   No doubt what gene pool that little boy came from.

Just being around these families was energizing and hopeful.

Gibson’s Bakery

At the same time, the ruling came down that the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Oberlin College in Gibson’s Bakery’s claim against it.  The school will have to pay a $36 million dollar judgment for defaming the bakery, now that the school has run out of appeals. 

I won’t regurgitate the facts here.  The case is fully and fairly presented (both sides) in Bari Weiss’s September 1 podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/oberlin-accused-the-gibsons-of-racism-now-it-owes/id1570872415?i=1000578020237).   As someone who has worked with many family businesses over the course of my career, it was hard to listen to the facts surrounding Oberlin’s vendetta against the bakery.   Oberlin’s president either had awful attorneys or chose to stick her fingers in her ears and hum when they gave her guidance.  The Gibson family, as so many families that run bakeries, viewed their calling as a labor of love and were pillars of the community.  To hear the school students and administration set out to gratuitously destroy a multi-generation business was appalling.  The impact on the family and its employees was devastating.  I know that the Gibson’s work harder than any of those protected school administrators (and deliver more value for society).

But the final resolution gave me some hope.  At least parts of our judicial system is capable of resisting Woke ideology and is capable of delivering justice.  It was gratifying to hear that Oberlin will feel the sting of just consequences, even if those administrators don’t personally suffer any loss (after all, they are insulated, unlike the Gibson’s).

I celebrated by ordering a Gibson’s baseball cap and a box of bakery goods through the Gibson’s website.

Beyond Red and Blue

 It’s been a corrosive few weeks for national unity.  There was the F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago in which agents even went through the belongings of Melania and Barron.   Then there was the rancor between Texas and Chicago, New York and D.C. as Texas governor Abbott began to ship illegals to these putative sanctuary cities.  Finally, there was the dark and menacing speech of Joe Biden, given in front of the dark blood red background, using marines as props, telling us that MAGA Republicans represent a threat to democracy, and then threatening his own citizens with F-15’s.  And if that wasn’t enough, there were the images of armed Antifa in the background of a drag queen show for children in Texas.

Everywhere you look, it appears that reasoned argument and engagement have evaporated, and have been replaced by division, anger, bitterness and hatred.  After Biden labeled Trump voters “semi-fascist,” it took all of my self-control not to send the clip to friends of mine that voted for Biden because of Trump’s “divisiveness.”   Cable news is divided into two camps—MSNBC and Fox, basically where the narratives run in parallel universes. 

It's hard to find any platform or any person that can make fact based policy arguments or make fair evaluations, particularly of Donald Trump.  I had great hopes for Bill Barr, and I thought his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another was generally about as fair as you get, but his recent statements on the raid of Mar-a-Lago betrayed his anti-Trump bias by making inaccurate statements (storing classified materials at a country club-not true) and making several assumptions about the unprecedented raid.

Nonetheless, I have identified a number of podcasts that I believe are eminently fair.   Despite the well-deserved criticism, the technology industry has provided at least one development that is worthwhile—the podcast.  Podcasts have picked up the slack that legacy media has left and have given voice to several people that legacy media has thrown overboard.  Liberated from time constraints, podcast discussions are often more nuanced and in depth.

Quillette
Quillette was the first podcast I listened to regularly.  With the slogan “Free Thought Lives” and its dedication to heterodoxy, Quillette has mostly been a great podcast to hear free thinkers that are willing to push back on Wokeness.  Still, I lost respect for its founder Claire Lehmann when she launched a series of personal and vituperative attacks on Bret Weinstein for his skepticism over COVID restrictions and vaccines.  She also has a tendency to post somewhat revealing photos of herself to show off her fit and attractive figure on social media, which, I think actually detracts from her images as a serious intellectual.  Still, Quillette remains a good podcast if you wish to swim against the tide.

DarkHorse
DarkHorse is one of my absolute favorites.  Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists that were driven from the faculty of Evergreen State by the Woke mob, and deplatformed by YouTube, this nominally progressive couple bring reason and the scientific method to the fight.   They almost always have something interesting to say, and Weinstein was one of the first to suggest that COVID may have originated in the Wuhan Lab, and warned of the ineffectiveness and safety issues of the mRNA vaccines.  Both have been highly vocal about the corruption of science in universities.  I particularly enjoy Heather’s rants and Bret’s nerdy humor.  Both are willing to engage and have lively discussions with people with a more conservative tilt that they have, which makes this podcast most thought provoking.

Honestly with Bari Weiss
Like Weinstein and Heying, Bari Weiss is a refugee from a legacy institution—the New York Times, and she has had to find an alternative way of making a living.  She is very smart, high energy and open minded.   Hers is the absolute best podcast if you want to hear frank discussions of both sides of an issue.  Her more recent podcasts included discussions of the Oberlin College case, Election Denial, and Feminism and Sexuality.  Her interviews have ranged from Mike Pompeo to Marianne Williamson.  She is a fierce defender of the principles of free speech and is on the advisory board of both the new University of Austin and the Foundation Against Intolerance of Racism.   Who knew that I would consider a liberal liberal Jewish lesbian from the New York Times to be one of young intellectuals for whom I have the utmost respect---but so much for labels.

The Glenn Show
The odd benefit of Woke is that I was introduced to the thinking and ideas of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter—“The Black Guys.”   Loury is an economist from Brown and McWhorter, a linguist, hails from Columbia.   I rarely miss their bi-weekly discussions.  Loury is more conservative of the two but McWhorter almost always gets me thinking in a different direction.   I have a special affinity for Loury since he is originally from Chicago’s South Side and his life has had its own travails, which lends authenticity to his views.  He is certainly not a lifelong ivory tower guy.  Loury and McWhorter often have disagreements and their friendship and civility toward one another is a model for all of us.

In addition to these, I also like New Discourses by James Lindsay, which is sometimes long and detailed but provides a comprehensive analysis of Woke ideology and Marxism.   Victor Davis Hanson’s weekly podcasts are a regular for me as well as Hanson provides a historical perspective on things.  Megyn Kelly’s podcast is also quite good.  Although she tilts rights, she is open minded, is an excellent interviewer, and is open minded.   Her delightful personality comes out more in her podcast than it did on legacy media.

The four podcasts that I highlighted provide a nice balance.   In this hyperpartisan and rancorous atmosphere, it is easy to get siloed and walled off from other perspectives.  Social media and its algorithms are designed to magnify these differences and harden us into tribal camps.  The trouble with Wokeness is that it doesn’t admit or acknowledge legitimate differences of opinion and neither will it acknowledge contrary evidence—it argues with the four D’s—deny, dismiss, disparage and double down.  These podcasts allow for legitimate discourse.

 

 

 

Summer Reading List

 Now that summer is winding down, the days are shortening, and Labor Day is around the bend, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are.  On one of her recent podcasts, Megyn Kelly mentioned that she thought that Labor Day was a better day for a fresh start than New Year’s Day.   Those of us still stuck in the circadian rhythm of an academic calendar so many years later tend to agree.  Labor Day marks a “back to business” turn of the calendar after barbeques, beaches and long, soft, languorous evenings.

And as we head into fall, it seems that our society as we once knew it is being shaken to the core, values are being inverted, the elite and the criminal class are being protected, encased in protective cocoons, while the rest of us are being bullied, taxed, intimidated, and, in our inner cities, actually assaulted be the criminal class.  Institutions that we thought inviolate—the F.B.I., CDC, and our school systems from K-12 to higher education have been hijacked.   Drag queens and school librarians, and the medical profession sexualize our young children, and in the most egregious government absurdity, millions of illegals cross our border unimpeded and with them loads of deadly fentanyl while New York makes it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase whipped cream in a canister.

There are days, I am sure, that, like me, you are trying to figure out what, exactly is going on.  These are the books that I recommend to help sort things out and restore your sanity—or at least help you understand that your disorientation is warranted.

The War on the West by Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray has emerged as a leading public intellectual and a worthy heir to the position left void after the death of William F. Buckley.   I find it terribly ironic that the leading intellectuals defending Western democracy and culture are NOT American (see Yoram Hyzony below).   I list Murray’s short, succinct and very readable book as indispensable for an understanding of what we are up against—a serious attack on the West as we have seen since WWII. 

               “In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today.  For just as we are not up against justice, but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality, but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.”

If you only have time to read one, this is it.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has been deeply concerned about this revolutionary movement, a Democratic party that resembles the Soviet apparatus more closely than the working man’s Democratic party of a generation or two ago.  He cites the globalist pretensions of the elite, the open and unsymmetric trade with China, open borders and a huge unelected and powerful bureaucracy as some of the forces that are eroding America’s uniqueness. 

               “When American companies outsource their jobs overseas, the American worker usually becomes weaker, not stronger.  When elites enjoy trillions of dollars in joint-venture investments in China, they are less, not more, likely to speak out against authoritarian Chinese anti-Americanism.  When the international community seeks to establish climate change canons for the United States without a constitutionally mandated treaty, the US Congress becomes weaker, not stronger.”

Hanson’s book, along with his podcasts, keep you anchored and aware of how far we have drifted from our unified sense and purpose as a nation, as well as from Constitutional norms.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony

Hazony’s book is among the most thought provoking and enlightening to me.   I’ve struggled to decide whether I am a conservative or a libertarian, a conservative with libertarian leanings, or a libertarian with conservative leanings, and I suspect I am not alone in that regard.  Hazony, an Israeli, helped me clarify those issues and makes a compelling case as to why Jeffersonian liberalism left the door open to this neo-Marxist wave we are experiencing.   Hazony emphasizes the need for the US to return to its Christian roots (with accommodation for Judaism) a premise with which I agree.  The erosion of Christianity has allowed Wokeism to move in as a competing religion.

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher

Dreher’s book is also very short and readable.  The title taken from the quote by Aleksander Solzenitsyn, Dreher warns of the soft totalitarian encroachment by the radical Left.  Like Hazony, Dreher sees a return to Christianity as a pillar against this encroachment:

Communism had a particular ideological vision that required it to destroy traditions, including traditional Christianity.  Nothing outside the communist order could be allowed to exist…. This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.”  A person duc off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Reading Dreher, you will see why the neo-communists are eager to rewrite history (The 1619 Project) and tear down and deface our statues.

Now, it you’d rather ingest this by way of fiction, there is none other than Lionel Shriver.  She is far and away my favorite living fiction writer.

The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver

Published in 2016, before COVID and the coming of the Biden, her novel centers around a US debt crisis, and collapse of the US economy, and the ensuing social collapse and rise of an authoritarian government.  It is frighteningly prescient as some people escape to outlying states (Nevada) to attempt to put themselves beyond the reach of an authoritarian US government.

While I highly recommend The Mandibles, Should We Stay or Should We Go and The Motion of the Body Through Space also are excellent products of Shriver’s sharp, incisive mind.

I know I may have gotten this backwards---putting out the summer reading list at summer’s end, but these selections promise to enlighten you in the coming chilly autumn evenings.

Thuggery

 A few months ago, I posted about the emergence of stealth Islamism in the U.S.

https://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2022/05/stealth-islamism.html

The indicia of Islamism seeping into our society are all around us, I observed, although they have arrived under a different rubric.   But the signs are unmistakable--- forced facial coverings (under the rubric of COVID measures), genital mutilation (under the rubric of trans rights), and the conversion of higher education into madrassas (teaching Wokeism rather than critical thinking).   Taken together, these things start to look suspiciously like fundamentalist Islam gaining a foothold in the U.S. by stealth.

But this week, Islamism broke out into the open with the attack on Salman Rushdie, fulfilling the order of a decades old fatwah issued by Ruhollah Khomeini back in 1989.  The knife attack was severe and Rushdie was put on a ventilator for some time.  He suffered nerve damage to his arm and may lose an eye.  Rushdie’s attacker has been arrested and charged with attempted murder and purportedly had loads of pro-Iranian regime posts on social media.   The New York Times and other media outlets, however, are predictably reporting that they “have no idea what his motive might be.”   Twitter, while banishing the likes of Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay and Donald Trump, has permitted Islamists praising Rushdie’s attacker to voice such sentiments on its platform. 

And remember, police foiled an attempt to kidnap and silence Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad just last summer with no reaction from our government.  Likewise, the attack on Rushdie has not elicited an outcry from this terrorist incident from our State Department.

Also, last week, the DOJ and FBI took the unprecedented step of raiding Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago.  Merrick Garland, who is intent on putting the bananas in banana republic, claimed that Trump had documents in his possession that belonged in the national archives and some of the materials may have been classified. 

The FBI, which is at a nadir of credibility after looking the other way on Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds, Hunter Biden’s shenanigans, Barack Obama’s removal of presidential materials, the fabricated evidence used to defraud the FISA court and enable the FBI to spy on Donald Trump.   And now, it has taken the radical step of raiding the dwelling of a political opponent. 

This is truly scary stuff for our republic.  It’s the stuff of the KGB, the Gestapo and South American dictatorships.   It’s pretty clear that after all the caterwauling by the Left about the US supporting tinpot dictatorships during the Cold War (and the constant drumbeat that Trump himself had totalitarian inclinations), once they have gained power, they have no inhibitions about actually becoming what they complained about. 

The attack on Rushdie and the unprecedented raid on Trump’s residence may seem like they are unrelated occurrences.   But they are not.  The radical Left and radical Islam are closet allies now.  Remember that the Biden (Obama) administration is frantically working to lift sanctions and resurrect the fatally flawed JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal).  It sees Israel as the oppressor in the Middle East and seeks to empower Iran and diminish Israel’s standing in the Middle East.   Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are revered members of The Squad, and their rank antisemitism has been whitewashed by Pelosi and Biden.   Although there is evidence that Rushdie’s attacker was in communication with the Iranian regime, the Biden administration has been curiously silent about this vicious attack on not only a pre-eminent author but on one of the most sacred principles of the West.

In addition to the eerie fetish for face coverings, the Iranian regime and the Biden regime are both keen on silencing apostates.   Recall that Trump’s powerful signature line at the 2016 RNC was “I am your voice!”  The radical Left decided that could not stand and went to work undermining Trump at every turn, culminating in last week’s unprecedented raid.   Recently, the Biden regime tried to muzzle free speech with its Disinformation Governance Board until it was mocked out of existence.  For now, the Biden administration will have to be content to try to control dissenters’ speech through its proxies in social media, NPR and the New York Times.   The Islamists of Iran are a bit more blunt--- they will do it with knives, guns and bombs when opportunity arises.

The radical Left declared a fatwah against Donald Trump just as Khomeini did against Rushdie. 

The parallels are unmistakable if you are looking for them.

Show Me the Data

 In this era of obfuscation and false narrative, there are two mantras that bear repeating:  Show Me the Data and Follow the Money.  (Unfortunately, “Show Me The Data has already been taken by someone as her Twitter handle or would have grabbed it).  If we were to follow just those two precepts, the nation would be in much, much better shape.   Taken together, they strip out narrative and partisanship, and imply a healthy level of skepticism.  Applied to policy, they will likely us you on the correct path, or at least help avoid costly blunders.

The first incredible blunder with the handling of data in recent years was the second Gulf War.  While information gathered through intelligence sources is often uncertain, the magnitude of this blunder was enormous.  Launched under the justification that Saddam Hussein had violated the cease fire (true) of the first Gulf War and was developing WMD (not true), the US launched a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killed and maimed thousands of US service men and women, cost trillions of dollars and ended up empowering Iran at the end of the day.  All with scanty evidence that the assertion was, in fact, true.

Not to be outdone, our CDC, NIH and Anthony Fauci likewise reacted horrifically and imposed enormous costs on our country by not only misinterpreting data, but putting out false and sketchy data itself.  Even worse than was the case in the first Gulf War, social media served to either suppress or amplify evidence as it chose.  Individuals that spoke to the credibility of the Lab Leak Theory of COVID’s origin were banned from social media as were people that espoused the use of Ivermectin as a treatment.   We never really got an accurate figure of COVID deaths because the CDC obfuscated deaths “with COVID” and “from COVID.”   The CDC relentlessly pushed vaccines, even with little evidence of their efficacy and with no data on their long term adverse effects.  Government forced members of our armed forces out of service and forced children to be masked in school, doing terrible damage to our national security and the intellectual and emotional development of our children—with no benefit.  Now, life insurance companies are reporting a 40% increase in death rates among 18-49 year olds.  We are seeing evidence of increases in myocardia, and other maladies.  One of the nation’s top female athletes, Nelly Korda was recently hospitalized with blood clots.   Joe Biden, among others, contracted COVID despite being vaccinated a double boosted, yet the CDC had blathered last year that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”   As with the second Gulf War, the government manipulated the data to create a narrative that was extremely costly for the US, and unnecessarily so.

Then there was the narrative that the police were targeting blacks unjustly and shooting innocent, unarmed blacks systemically.    The trouble is that the data never matched the narrative.  Tucker Carlson did his homework and went through each incident of a police shooting of an unarmed black in the previous year and found only 2 situations where the shooting was unjustified and those were prosecuted.   When Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer in a careful study likewise found no disparity in the treatment of blacks by the Houston police department, however, he was “canceled” by Harvard with a trumped us sexual harassment charge (I will write more on that in a subsequent post).  This narrative is being used to justify “defunding the police” with catastrophic consequences for our cities.

Likewise, the Department of Justice claims that white supremacism remains a top security threat (especially at school board meetings).  Yet we see no actual evidence to support that assertion.

We have plenty of  smart and sophisticated people and analytical techniques available to use data to come to sound policy decisions for our society.  It’s time we start using them.

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.