What's Going on Here, Really?

 Rather than make observations, and posit conclusions, this post will ask a question to which I have no clear answer.

The firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News has caused quite a stir and speculation as to the reason behind his termination.  Carlson, as an outspoken critic of the Woke, the Left, and the establishment Republicans certainly had a target on his back.  He was the subject of advertiser boycotts, attacked as a racist and a white supremacist, doxxed and physically threatened in restaurants and at his home.  Yet, he anchored the Fox evening lineup, and had a wide and loyal following.  Fox shares were down 5% in the day following the announcement. The 8 p.m. slot for Fox has tanked by two-thirds, dragging the rest of the evening lineup down with it.  The people at Fox had to know that this would be the result.  

Traditionally, most organizations expend a great deal of energy, planning, and resources to hang on to a loyal core customer base and seek to build around it.  Consulting firms, MBA programs, and executives spend innumerable hours developing strategies to cement loyalty among their customers.  Nonprofits—universities, charities, private schools and the like do the same with their donors.

But in the era of Woke, we have seen the opposite behavior.  Companies and nonprofits have demonstrated a willingness to abandon core customers or donors in their quest to display their Wokeness.

What’s going on here?

Tucker Carlson’s abrupt dismissal and the blow to Fox News comes on the heels of the Bud Light debacle as they appointed transgender Dylan Mulvaney as their mascot.  The Anheuser-Busch Brand suffered a 17% loss in revenue and a 21% loss in volume in the wake of the Mulvaney debacle.  Alyssa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s marketing VP has been placed  on leave.  It’s mind boggling to consider this Harvard/Wharton MBA grad did not model out or anticipate the impact this decision would make on sales, the brand, and the company’s stock price, and no one on her staff  warned her off.  

These are irrational business decisions, and similar decisions are being made in board rooms across the country.  The N.F.L. alienated many of its faithful fans by backing Colin Kaepernick.  Many college alumns have stopped writing checks to their alma maters.    The local Catholic high school here allowed their largest donor to walk away over BLM. 

This seems to be irrational organizational behavior to me.  Or is it?  Is the Woke culture so strong that it overwhelms ordinary marketing and finance considerations?  Does it give a license to managers, trustees and boards of directors to abdicate their fiduciary duties to the organizations they are charged with overseeing?   Do they believe that the drop is temporary and that customers and donors will return (as most of the NFL fans did) once the kerfuffle dies down?   Or is something else going on here?  In the corporate world, it’s clear that ESG (on which I will have more to say on a later post) is giving managers an escape hatch to allow them to duck ordinary duties to put profits first.  Are these people making a conscious decision to subordinate their organizations to the demands of Woke or are they just not very capable?  

I have heard different answers from different people on this issue. That brand suicide is becoming more common leads me to believe that simple incompetent planning and strategy is an inadequate explanation.  Something more is going on here.

The Barbell Party

 It’s hard to discern precisely when it happened or if it was tied to a specific event or even whether it resulted from the implementation of a deliberate strategy, but the Democratic party transformed itself from the party of the “working man” to what I have called the Barbell Party.

The contours of the federal government in the 20^th century were initially shaped by the Republican Roosevelt.  As America industrialized, Teddy Roosevelt established the precedent that the federal government had a role to play in offsetting large corporate power.  Known as the trustbuster, TR used the levers of government to push back against railroads, big steel, big coal and the like to provide a “guardian angel” to the average American worker.

A few decades later, as the Great Depression devastated the U.S., FDR used the federal government to attempt to battle its impact.  Whatever you think of FDR, his programs were aimed at restoring the dignity and income of the average working man.  The TVA, WPA, CCC, CWA were all conceived to provide real work and dignity to ordinary Americans.   And for most of the 20^th century, Democrats counted on working people as the mainstay of their constituency and advanced workers’ rights and unions and union membership.  Again, the main constituency was Everyman.

Both TR and FDR sought to use government to protect American worker’s ability to work and provide for his family.

But something changed, and I mark that shift with the housing collapse in ’08 and the election of Barack Obama.

The light bulb went on for me in about 2012.

I happened to catch an episode of a home improvements show (which my wife loves to watch).  A young black couple- both teachers—absolutely giddy over their new home.  It was clear that the show was taped before the crash. They had borrowed 95% of the purchase price.  And borrowed the down payment.   They were ordinary people and we all know how that story ended.

Their lives were ruined.  They lost the house.  No one backstopped them.  But the boys and girls at Goldman Sachs and places like that had their net worths protected.

Then, hedge fund manager Cliff Asness made an astute observation.  He distributed a Venn Diagram with overlapping circles that showed the Tea Party on one side and Occupy Wall Street on the other.  Although the constituents are almost polar opposites in the nominal political parties they support, he noted that they were mostly complaining about the same things.

That’s when it became clear to me that the Democratic party (and the Republican establishment) primarily backstopped the Professional Managerial Elite. 

The next big thing, of course, was COVID. 

For everyman, there were rules, lockdowns and shutdowns.   The local bagel deli was shut and could only do takeout.  But Walmart stayed open.  The local bookstore was shuttered.  But Amazon was hardly impacted.  Independent restaurants were closed, wrecking the livelihoods of thousands of hardworking entrepreneurs.  The most pernicious aspect of this was that certain of the Professional Managerial Elite were deemed to be “essential workers” and were allowed to return to their offices, while other working men and women were confined to their homes.  Landlords (most of whom are independent property owners)  were barred from enforcing their rights to evict for nonpayment of rent.  In some egregious situations, landlords were living out of their cars while tenants refused to pay rent and thumbed their noses at landlords.

During the Floyd riots, people were allowed to protest, riot, and attend mass funerals for the career criminal George Floyd.  Politicians were allowed to get their hair coiffed,  eat at restaurants unmasked, and go on vacation, all in violation of the rules government officials established.

In responding to the two big adverse events- the housing crash of ’07-’08, the federal government acted to protect the elite and crush average Americans. 

And this theme shows no evidence of reversing itself.  The government responded to the insolvency of Silicon Valley Bank by guaranteeing all deposits, even thought the limit is $250,000 per depositor.  Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors are mostly the wealthy venture capital funds or companies owned by wealthy venture capital funds.  Yet in the same month, when East Palestine, Ohio was turned down for emergency funds and virtually ignored by the feds when a train derailment unleashed an ecological and health catastrophe.

It's very clear that at least since the election of Barack Obama, the Democratic party (and the federal government when it is in power) has morphed into something very different.  It uses its power and influence to guarantee economic outcomes for the elite.  Unlike FDR, it does not try to create conditions for working class employment, but simply to transfer wealth to “marginalized peoples” and empower the criminal class.  Average working people are ignored, held in contempt or affirmatively shut out.

It is now the Barbell Party.  It advocates the interests at both ends but nothing in the middle.

Non-Negotiables

 House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries recently tweeted out “Reproductive freedom is not negotiable.”

There are a few problems with his tweet, not the least of which is that it is inaccurate and disingenuous.  Jeffries uses the phrase “reproductive freedom” but he really means “abortion.”  Further, abortion rights and limitations on it ARE negotiable, and as a society, we mostly arrived at an uncomfortable negotiated settlement—first trimester abortions were ok; no public funds to be used to finance them.

But, as usual, the Radical Left couldn’t stick to a deal and they pushed abortion to the moment of birth (and maybe a little after if the baby survived) and pushed to reverse the Hyde Amendment which barred the use of public funds for abortions.  The Dobbs decision solidified the notion that this issue IS negotiable as it kicked it to the states.

But if we’re going to talk about non-negotiables, I have a list of my own.  As I discussed in my last post, Majorie Taylor Greene caused quite a kerfuffle when she publicly asked for a national divorce, with some even calling her treasonous.  But if Jeffries is going to issue edicts that are nonnegotiable, here are some non-negotiables if we are to stay together as a nation.  Otherwise, I believe that we do stand a good chance of fracturing.

Sovereignty
We are a nation state with territorial integrity.  This means no open border, no Chinese spy balloons floating across our territory unharassed, and no handing decisions over the freedoms of our peoples to foreign bodies like the WHO.  Absolutely not.  Full stop. 

The notion that anyone can walk into this country and stay in violation of our laws—and get state benefits for doing so must cease.   We can have a discussion over how many immigrants are allowed to enter, but the notion that our immigration laws will not be enforced, and worse, that certain jurisdictions can declare themselves “sanctuary cities” harkens back to nullification, and we know where that went.

Moreover, while we from time to time need to enter into treaties with other nations, we must do so while preserving our own sovereignty.  This notion that the U.S. will hand over its response to a pandemic to the WHO (which misled during the entire COVID pandemic) is utterly abhorrent.  Treaties are treaties and approval must conform to the approval set forth in the Constitution--- not by executive fiat.

Restoring our full sovereignty is nonnegotiable and is a priority of first order if we are to stay together as a republic. 

Roll back and De-weaponize the Administrative State.
The Administrative State makes law, prosecutes and adjudicates, all without consent of the sovereign.  Its power was on full display during COVID lockdowns, inflicting massive pain on businesses and families.  The CDC even took a meat cleaver to fundamental concepts of private property by permitting tenants to refrain from paying rent without any recourse from landlords.  This resulted in disfigured and warped situations where some landlords were living in their cars while tenants were warm and comfy in their homes and not paying rent.  The Founders never envisioned that unelected bodies would have this kind of power.

The most egregious symptom of administrative state overreach has been the weaponization of the enforcement agencies for political purposes.  With limited exceptions, for most of our nation’s history, we counted on the enforcement agencies such as the FBI and IRS to play it straight.  Since the Obama years, this is no longer the case and is a real danger to the Republic.  It started in earnest with Lois Lerner at the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, dragging its feet in granting exemptions.   It then got very ugly with the FBI, as it falsified documents for the FISA Court, harassed pro-life conservatives, raided Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence, paid social media to censor conservative viewpoints, and holding on to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

We cannot have enforcement agencies turn into the Stasi to punish political enemies, target certain groups or surveil American citizens with an end around the 4^th Amendment.   Weaponizing these agencies is non-negotiable.

Election Integrity
Election denier has now become a thing.  Beginning with the 2000 election of Bush v. Gore, we have begun to challenge election results.   But just as important as determining a winner, our system has to persuade the loser that the results were accurate and fairly determined.  COVID, mail-in ballots, and rule changes blew that out of the water. 

The midterms evidenced worse defects.  In Pennsylvania, 70% of the ballots were received before the debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman clearly showed Fetterman’s mental deficiencies.  In Arizona, substantial numbers of voters in key districts were likely disenfranchised because of glitches with the voting machines enabling Katie Hobbs to snatch the election from Kari Lake.

We have tossed illegals into the mix, early voting, ballot harvesting and some states now permit ballots to arrive long after election day with no signature verification.   All these things conspire to through into question the results of elections.  And if we can’t determine policy choices at the ballot box, they will eventually be made through mob rule and violent action.

Restoring election integrity, with severe limitations placed on mail-in ballots and early voting is non-negotiable if we are to stay together.

Protections for Women and Children
A society that doesn’t provide special protections for women and children is doomed.   Over the past five years, the Woke movement has destroyed them.   Women’s sports has been ruined by the transgender movement as women are now forced to compete with biological males in all sports—including swimming, powerlifting, hockey and MMA.  The absurdity of it all reached an apogee with Lia Thomas cleaning up the Ivy League while all of the other women stood looking dispirited and dumbfounded.  Not only are they forced to give back all the gains that Title IX afforded women, but their privacy rights are being invaded in the name of “inclusivity”   as their locker rooms and showers are invaded by wagging penises.  California prisons now permit men that identify as women to be placed in women’s prisons.   And we know where that goes.  The media is on board with this charade, using the words “persons with a uterus” and “chestfeeding” to further denigrate women’s role in a healthy society.  Even Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stumbled over the question, “What is a woman?” deferring that she “was not a biologist.  It’s a question most of us could answer that by 1^st grade without biological training.   Discussion of putting women in front line combat roles deserves its own essay, and I will refrain from commenting here.

Most maddening is the assault on the minds of children.  It started with drag queen story hour through the library system, aimed at 3-8 year old children, and has now graduated to “gender affirmation” hormone treatments and disfiguring surgery, as well documented by Abigail Shrier in her book Irreversible Damage.  I won’t repeat her arguments here, but the fact that the transgender activists have captured the American Medical Association and American Psychological Association as well as many school systems is deeply disturbing.  Psychiatrists can only “affirm” a child’s self-diagnosis that they are another gender, taking away a primary role of the profession—to diagnose.  And school systems and libraries are exposing children as young as kindergarten to genderism with explicit materials in school libraries.  Objections to age appropriate materials are met with howls and shrieking “Book Burners.”  Of course, this is nothing of the sort.  Nobody sought to ban drag queens or explicit materials until they started dragging our kids into it.  As pedophiles desperately tried to latch on to the LGBT movement, they attempted to change the designation to “minor attracted persons” and California has changed its laws to loosen criminal penalties and make prosecutions much harder for such offenses. 

A healthy nation provides special protections for women and children.  It is a nonstarter at keeping this nation together.  They are our future.  It is a hill to die on.

DEI,  CRT and Reparations
This has to go. Now.  These are very, very bad and corrosive ideas, tearing at the fabric of our society.  We can stipulate that slavery and Jim Crow were terrible and that they had long term effects.  But we don’t hold the grandchildren of the Nazis accountable for what their grandfathers did.  DEI, CRT and reparations have to be torn out root and branch.  DEI and CRT have largely accomplished three things—none of them good.  They have destroyed merit in business and academia.  They have created a class of college education make work workers- DEI officers.  And, along with the thought of reparations, are creating a lot of resentment with a threat of a real backlash.

The emphasis on diversity and inclusion must be replaced by an emphasis on social cohesion and merit.  In a multi-race, multi-ethnic nation, social cohesion is a greater virtue than any attempt to remediate past wrongs.   Our nation is fundamentally a forward looking one, not backwards looking.  Attempts to do so will only be counterproductive.  We need to go back to the MLK  precepts of judging people by the content of their character.  To do otherwise runs the risk of devolving into Rwanda, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, or South Africa.  The track record is very clear.

So, Mr. Jeffries, this is MY list of non-negotiables.  Majorie Taylor Greene might be viewed as a right wing zealot, but if we cannot restore these four points, I do not wish to share a polity with those that would deny them.  That they are even up for discussion is patently revolting to me and they must be put back in their proper place—and soon or a national divorce (and I prefer not to have one) is in order.  But we simply cannot go on like this.

 

Wrong Turns

Majorie Taylor Greene called for a national divorce, something I wrote about several years ago when I had begun to sense that things had gone off the rails.  Fundamental schisms in our nation began to appear, schisms for which no compromise position is readily available: abortion, open border, defund the police among them.  These elements combined to produce a perfect storm, capable of ripping the country apart.   As with most relationships on the rocks, there is plenty of blame to go around, although at this moment, it is the neo-Marxists that are pushing us to the edge.  But conservatives and libertarians also contributed to the mess.

This era will not pass easily, I fear.  In a highly unscientific poll I conducted among some well-informed friends and acquaintances just prior to Covid, when asked whether the United States would continue to exist as a single sovereign entity 10 years from now, 14 said yes, 11 said no.  Of the 14 that said yes, 2 said yes with the caveat that it would exist 10 years from now, but not 25.  Admittedly, this was a small, and likely biased sample, but the numbers led to the conclusion that the U.S. cannot be counted on, that a substantial number of people believe that the American Experiment is unwinding.

Here are the six factors that permitted our Republic to become unstable—so unstable that “national divorce” was recently trending on Twitter.

China
Our false assumption about China is probably the single biggest misstep that damaged our nation.  And this was a bi-partisan error.   It started as an attempt to triangulate our posture in the Cold War with Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.   Within a short time following the Tiananmen Square massacre, our government pretended it didn’t happen and China was admitted to the WTO in 1995.  With that door open, China used that to systematically strip out our manufacturing base, steal our intellectual property, and then send their youth to the U.S. to be educated (see below) in a totally one-sided deal

As recently as 5 years ago, the free market gurus at the University of Chicago were still chirping that China would have to respond to its burgeoning middle class as its wealth grew and the regime would be forced to moderate.  There was very little dissent from that premise.  A few lone voices like John Mersheimer, who asserted, “You do not want China to become rich” were dismissed as cranks.  Libertarians like Deirdre McCloskey derided Trump’s attempt to correct this one way street in part through tariffs as “just plain stupid.”

The consequences of this error are grievous and were the exact opposite of what the “experts’ predicted.  China became more aggressive and tyrannical, reneged on its deal with Hong Kong, built a formidable military and is now threatening Taiwan.  It destroyed countless industries and small towns and deprived us of continuous opportunities to innovate and improve as factory floors moved to China.  Enabling the rise of a peer competitor will be seen as one of history’s greatest bludners.

Higher Education
Jonathan Cole wrote The Great American University ten years ago.  In it, he correctly claimed that the United States higher education system was the envy of the world, with the U.S. claiming almost all of the top universities in the world, with Columbia and The University of Chicago as the finest.  Even better, we ran parallel systems—private and public universities that competed with each other for students and faculty and it made both better.

My, how far things have fallen.  While there remain pockets of excellence, mostly in STEM departments, higher education is in a shambles, and many people, including Daniel Pipes, are predicting its collapse.  Like leukemia, critical theory has gotten into its bones, and rotted the entire system from within. 

Almost every bad idea has emerged from this poisonous system.  From denying basic Constitutional rights to a fair trial and free speech to renewing segregation emanated from college campuses.  Hatred of Western Civilization and America’s miraculous founding is bred there.  Yale, for instance, ceased teaching its course in Western Art.  The University of Chicago is now proposing to teach a course entitled “The Problem of Whiteness.”  The University of Illinois requires faculty to write an affirmative diversity statement to be considered for tenure.  Good luck getting a faculty job in any humanities, history, or English department if you are conservative or libertarian. 

Administrative State
It is now widely accepted- even by our own government, that the most likely genesis of COVID was the Wuhan Lab, funded in part by our own government and the notorious Dr. Fauci, through EcoHealth Alliance.  Fauci himself not only helped fund gain of function research that led to this dark chimera, he recommended masking and lockdowns, that did more damage to the U.S. population than a nuclear device set off in a medium sized city.  The CDC under Rochelle Walensky fortified his position, stripping Americans of many civil liberties, pushed vaccine mandates (even among children that present no risk), abrogated property rights by recommending rent abatement, and distorting, lying and demonizing anyone that took an opposing position (i.e. the Barrington Group).

The CDC and NIH need to be razed for doing what they did to us.

But the damage doesn’t end there.   The EPA, Department of Education, Energy Department all have developed a life and accrued power unto themselves never envisioned by the nation’s founders.  These agencies act separate and apart from our lawmakers and are wholly unresponsive to the will of the people.

But wait, it gets worse.  Over the past decade or so, enforcement agencies like the IRS and the FBI—agencies that we count on to play it straight have become political weapons, acting in a wholly partisan fashion to punish political enemies in a very Stasi-like fashion.  The F.B.I. is probably the worst of them, actively hiding the criminality of Hunter Biden, entrapping Michael Flynn,  the “kidnap plotters” of Gretchen Whitmer and most likely the January 6 protesters as well.  

Meanwhile, the agencies we count on to protect us—the Defense Department have been overrun by a group of technologically backwards sheep herders in Afghanistan and permitted a slow moving balloon to traverse the entire U.S. gathering intelligence.

Our administrative state is utterly out of control.

Tribalism and the Criminal Inversion
These go hand in hand so I lumped them together.  By pushing the “systemic racism” myth, black Americans that act badly have been able to escape the consequences of their anti-social behavior.  Moreover, in a warped effort to increase black “achievement,” the bar for performance has been lowered in all aspects of life—from college and graduate school admissions to promotions in the workplace,  what I have called a Reverse Apartheid has set in.  Stanford University’s incoming class is 22% white despite whites being 68% of the population.  United Airlines says it wants 50% of the pilots in  it pilot training to be black.  In cities like Chicago, which is nearly evenly divided among whites, Hispanics and blacks, it is nearly impossible to get a job in city government with any power unless you are black.  This state of affairs is breeding deep resentment.

Worse, is the celebration of the criminal class.  Whatever your view of the George Floyd incident, to have statues erected to this career criminal—a guy who was so bad that society put him away for 5 years—is obscene and ludicrous.   The same thing for Jacob Blake.  Blake it will be recalled, dove under a car seat groping for a weapon after police told him to stop and he was shot as a result.  Kamala Harris jumped on an airplane to visit him and told him she was “proud of him.” 

A society that reverses an emphasis on achievement and merit, and not only tolerates but erects statues and paint murals celebrating criminals is in deep, deep trouble.

Misalignment
In a happier time, the nation achieved a balance, however imperfect.  Government kept a watchful eye on business, so that it could not get too powerful and unaccountable.  The press kept a watchful eye on government to the same end.  But now government, big business, and media have all moved to the same side of the equation, with the citizenry on the other side.

Government is supposed to protect people against threats larger than they can themselves handle.  Yet in the last two large disasters it moved not to protect the bulk of Americans but to protect the elite.  Whatever you think about Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, his policy moves were aimed at lifting average Americans.  The policy moves in response to the Great Recession of ’07-09 and Covid hung average workers and small business owners out to dry while the weight of government protected the elite—Wall Street bankers and big business.  The local pub was required to be closed during Covid but Walmart could sell cases of beer. 

The forces tearing at our republic are numerous and complex.  I have highlighted just a few. 

We are in the most tumultuous time since WWII and I believe that freedom, liberty and truth will prevail in the long run.  But the next decade will be rough.

The Woke Turning Point

 Conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a seminal book which conservatives and thinking liberals alike gave rave reviews entitled “Live Not By Lies.”  The book is one of the anti-Woke cannon, along with The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad, Woke Capitalism by Vivek Ramiswami, Woke Racism by John McWhorter, and Race Marxism by James Lindsay.

In his January 23 piece in The American Conservatism, Dreher asks “What was the Woke Tipping Point?”  Dreher asks what one event over the past 20 years led to the mess America is in?  Dreher concludes that the single event that has led to the Woke-tastrophe was the failure to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the Obergefell decision,  which would have codified traditional marriage into the Constitution. 

What Was The Woke Tipping Point? - The American Conservative

Dreher is partially correct.  He asserts, “The loss of the one-male and one-female binary as the exclusive model for marriage was the turning point….Recognizing that wokeness is a broad phenomenon, if I had to pick a single event as the most causative of advancing wokeness, I would say the Obergefell decision Constitutionalizing same sex marriage.

 I think Dreher is partially correct, but only partially.  It is difficult to pin the Wokification of America on a single event or source,   He is correct that the erosion of marriage and the family unit is a significant aspect of Woke.   The Obergefell decision came soon thereafter, wiping out the tradition of state jurisdiction over the governance of marriage and eradicating any local democratic input over how people wish to construct the mores of their society.  The transgender movement quickly latched on the to gay rights movement (the fight over transgenders in bathrooms began days after the Obergefell decision came down), followed by the push to sexualize children through Drag Queen Story Hour and “gender education” schools.   Dreher is right to point all this out.

But Dreher frames Wokeism incorrectly.  He contends that The Great Awokening covers “sex, gender, and race”.  He is incorrect and by not framing it up correctly, he inadvertently cripples our ability to fight back.

Wokeness is comprised of three prongs.  Or as I call it, the Woke holy trinity.  They are taken as an article of faith and questioning them is an act of blasphemy in Woke society.  Dreher names only 2 of them and, as a result, gets the inflection point wrong.  The holy trinity of Wokeness is gender ideology, racial justice, climate change.  

The Woke Tipping Point was the election of Barack Obama.  Obama didn’t emphasize gender ideology.  In fact, early in his political career, he said that marriage was between a man and a woman- then pivoted. 

But his zeal was placed on “racial justice,” whatever that means, and in particular he is the individual that is singularly responsible for the violent crime that roils our big cities now.    He set the tone early, falsely smearing the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” for questioning Henry Louis Gates.   Trayvon Martin looked like the son he didn’t have, even though Zimmerman was found to have used justifiable force in repelling Trayvon.   His administration set the wheels in motion in Chicago with his consent decree that hamstrung police officers.  He demonized the police at every turn and, along with his sugar daddy, George Soros, got numerous pro-criminal DA’s elected.  Obama’s clever emphasis on “diversity” meant the lowering of standards everywhere== in academia,  in the workplace, in housing, and institutionalizing a de facto reverse apartheid in government and in large corporate life.  In Chicago, for instance, which is roughly divided among equal thirds among Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks, Whites and Hispanics are mostly frozen out of any city government jobs that matter. 

Obama fully embraced the third prong of Wokeness—climate change tyranny.  He limited oil and gas leases on federal lands and killed the Keystone pipeline the first time around.  Worse, he sent eco-tyrant John Kerry to sign on to the ill-advised Paris Accord, which, among other things, obligated the U.S. to adhere to caps on emissions, while letting China and India off the hook for years—all the while permitting China to frantically construct scores of coal plants.  Even more absurdly, Obama committed the U.S. to be a major financier of a “green fund” which was to fund “green projects” in third world countries- again, a fund to which India and China were not obligated to participate in.  And because we run persistent deficits, we’ll end up borrowing some of those funds from—you guessed it—China.

The Obergefell decision was certainly an important milestone that helped to anchor the Woke movement, but LGBT ideology and its effect on the family is only one of the three prongs of Woke.  Obama’s election provided the accelerant to the other two.  Radical environmentalism under the banner of climate change, which threatens to destroy American capitalism and “social justice” and “equity,” which threatens social cohesion were seeded by Barack Obama.   He is rightly the godfather of the Woke movement.

 

The Ukrainian Dilemma

 Much of geopolitical thinking is still rooted in the horrors of the 20^th century.  The land grabs of Hitler and Stalin, the tremendous death toll and human costs scarred humanity for generations and for good reason.  Poland, for example, lost 20 percent of its population between them during WWII.  Ukraine was starved out (See the film Mr. Jones which vividly depicts it and the fake news campaign of Stalin) under Stalin.  Millions perished and millions more were enslaved under the Soviet system until the Berlin Wall fell in 1991.

It was natural, then, that the West should oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine- his attempt to pull it back into the Russian orbit last February.   As it did with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the world community was correct to respond by opposing the incursion into another country’s sovereignty.  The invasion was ordered by Vladimir Putin, the hated autocrat of Russia, hated even worse because U.S. Democrats had blamed Putin for meddling in the 2016 election, and impeached Trump over “Russian collusion,” which was never proved.  Still, Ukraine would be his third venture outside his borders, after Georgia in 2008, and Crimea in 2014. 

As someone that grew up with people that fled the Soviet bear claw, I am well aware of the terror and pain Russia is capable of inflicting on its neighbors.  Many of the parents and grandparents of my friends were put in detention camps, deported in boxcars, beaten, shot, and hunted like animals.  Putin is a bad actor and I have no sympathy for him.

Yet, I have a great deal of skepticism around Volodymir Zelenskyy and Ukraine. 

First of all, Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country, and has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Hunter Biden clearly did not get a board position on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma because of his energy expertise.  Further, Zelenskyy has banned the opposition party, and shut down the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.  The U.S. is not making the world safe for democracy in its support of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy himself became a media darling from the very beginning of the conflict.  “Churchillian” was the word most used to describe him.  There were lots of media photos purportedly showing Zelenskyy in trenches in his battle fatigues, defying the powerful Russian army.  At first, it was effective.  But then Zelenskyy started showing signs of overplaying his hand.  Instead of pleading for help, he started making demands.   He did an ill-advised photoshoot for Vogue magazine belied a lust for international fame and attention, as did his photo ops with various members of Congress, and his recent visit to the Golden Globe Awards.  His wife went on a $40,000 shopping spree in New York.  The worst incident was when Zelenskyy asserted that Russian missiles had landed on Polish soil and demanded a response from NATO.  The missiles turned out to be Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles.   Zelenskyy has raised eyebrows by pitching economic development and mentioning BlackRock and Goldman Sachs—you know, the guys that helped engineer the crash of ’08.  All of this has been bad optics.  People that talk about investing in a war torn area as an “opportunity” like those that spoke about the pandemic as an “opportunity” sets off a flashing yellow.

Another factor that raises some suspicion is his background as an actor, with ties to the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab.   This puts him in the same class with AOC and Greta Thunberg.  Zelenskyy is skilled at manipulating an audience.

Yet another issue that raises eyebrows is the amount of aid the US has given Ukraine in the form of cash and weaponry --$50 billion or so in 2022.  With that much of a blank check flowing into a corrupt country, asking where it is all going is a legitimate concern.  Yet, when Rand Paul threatened to hold up funding over an accounting for it all, he was denounced as an obstructionist.  We do know that some of it ended up with disgraced bitcoin pioneer Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt company.  There are rumors that Zelenskyy has helped himself to a healthy helping of taxpayer dollars.  The massive amount of additional debt that the U.S. has to shoulder leaves our government open to the obvious charge of why we are spending so much money to defend another nation’s borders when our own southern border remains wide open.   Zelenskyy is like the pro bono litigation client.  Since he’s not spending his own money, he has no incentive to come to the table and settle.

Finally, there is the geopolitical problem that I have been most worried about—Russian-Chinese collusion.  One of the primary reasons for Nixon’s visit to China in 1969 was to triangulate against the Soviet Union.  China and Russia should be natural antagonists but our clumsy foreign policy has created allies of them.  The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between Russia and Nazi Germany demonstrated that countries don’t have to like each other to become allies—at least temporarily.   But the reality is that Russia and China have held joint military exercises and have publicly acknowledged their alliance.  It is not far fetched to think that Xi and Putin agreed that Putin would continue to prosecute the war in Ukraine with Xi’s help and support.  The Ukrainian war is draining  the U.S. treasury and armaments, and the Biden Administration drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  To make matters worse, the Administration began to discharge warriors that refused the jab.  To fight a war, you need money, energy,  armaments, and skilled people—and under the Ukraine commitment and because of our own missteps all four have dwindled.   The U.S. simply does not have the industrial base to ramp up quickly to fight a major war against a peer competitor.  To top it off, our military command seems to be more interested in deterring “white rage” and having an environmentally “green” force than in deterring an aggressive China.

It seems there are no good guys in this drama. And there have been no articulated objectives.  Zelenskyy has, at various times,  asserted that regime change is his ultimate goal.  At others, it is to push every Russian out of Ukraine, even Crimea.  There has been no real push to broker a peace deal.  Secretary Blinken seems more absent than Buttigieg was on his paternity leave.  Henry Kissinger is advocating NATO membership with Ukraine.  Yet, Russia remains a nuclear power, and has threatened their use. 

What is to be done?

The West is sending  tanks—Germany is sending Leopards and the US is sending M1s, and this represents a substantial escalation.  Yet, there seems to be no consensus on a satisfactory outcome. Is it to roll back the current aggression?  Push every Russian out of Ukraine, including Crimea?  Topple Putin? Unless there is back channel talks we are unaware of, Secretary of State Blinken is as disconnected and absent in this as Buttigieg has been in every transportation problem this administration has faced.  There is no diplomatic effort to stop the killing and the protesters for peace that we saw in 1991 and Vietnam have aged out, and the New Left ironically has no interest in finding a peaceful solution.  How long will it be before Putin does resort to a nuke, or American advisors and trainers get killed?  At the very least, before another dollar is spent, we need to understand the objectives and must get an accounting for all of the money.

 

With at best ambiguous players in this awful scenario, and no end game in sight, Xi can only rub his hands together in glee as the West drains resources away.  

Jumping to Conclusions

 I typically divide up my New Year]s Resolutions by category and actually try to monitor them throughout the year.  I actually do accomplish some things and fall short in others.   I don’t even refer to them as “resolutions” but rather they are goals for the year.

One of the goals which is a carryover from last year and which I have had some success over the past two years is not jumping to conclusions.  

I got my first taste of it a few years ago when the incident involving the Covington kids popped up.  The imagery splurged across legacy media and social media was of a smug looking teenager sporting a MAGA hat looking down on a grizzled Native American as if he were harassing him.  The New York Times described him as a Vietnam Vet, and the framing of the photo was meant to look like a young white supremacist needling this patriotic old American Indian.  Several people immediately posted it on social media with their derisive comments, calling for the kid’s head.  And I admit, I was almost sucked in.  The narrative and images were quite persuasive.  But I refrained from posting any comment.

And it turned out that my inhibitions were correct.  When videos with other camera angles were revealed and the true facts came to light, we learned that the reality was just the opposite of what was portrayed by the media.  It was the Native American that was harassing Nicholas Sandmann, who then sued several media outlets and won settlement in his defamation lawsuits with the Washington Post and CNN. 

You would think that after the confrontation with the Covington kids, the fake hate crime of Jussie Smollett, and the fake noose of Bubba Wallace, that people would not rush to judgment following an event.  It’s pretty clear that legacy media and social media are willing to censor, distort or outright lie.  And when the facts turn out differently than are first presented, it can be quite embarrassing.  Nikki Haley found out the hard way when she rushed to decry the supposed “hate crime” perpetrated against Bubba Wallace, only to learn that the “noose” was merely a garage pull. 

But the Twitter crowd remains undeterred. 

When Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed with a cardiac issue recently, and we feared that we might have the first on field death since Detroit Lions player Chuck Hughes collapsed and died in 1971.  The Twitter crowd immediately began pointing fingers at the vaccine.  That may or may not be the case, but it was much too soon to leap to that conclusion.  It’s certainly possible, but demonizing Pfizer or Moderna is simply premature.

Then we had the sabotage against an electrical substation in North Carolina that plunged thousands into darkness for 4 days.  The sabotage occurred on the day following a large protest against a proposed drag queen show at a local theater.   Immediately, Twitter was flooded with posts claiming that the entire area is full of racists and bigots.  Several posts derided the sheriff as a redneck.  But there was not a shred of evidence that the act was motivated by the drag queen show (notwithstanding the fact that citizens are perfectly within their rights to object to such a thing in their community).   There have been several other attacks and intrusions on power stations throughout the country, and while no parties have been caught, it is increasingly unlikely that the drag queen show had anything to do with it.

Jumping to conclusions reveals a lack of critical thinking.  While the immediacy of social media tempts one to respond, a response often simply tells the world that you are siloed and vulnerable to confirmation bias.  People wanted to believe that far right redneck sabateurs were responsible for the attack on the substation in North Carolina.  People want to believe that the vaccination was the cause of Damar Hamlin’s near death experience.   People wanted to believe that the garage pull in Bubba Wallace’s garage was a noose put there by some racist.  Media bias and the number of false flags, especially in matters of alleged racist or bigoted acts (Smollett was the king of that) suggests that it is wise to wait for an event to simmer for awhile before commenting.  While some on social media could win a gold medal in an Olympic leaping to conclusions event, at least that is one of my continuing goals this year is to refrain from doing so.