Feminism Against Progress

 Mary Harrington has written an important book.  In the face of wrenching societal discord, tearing away at the fabric of the family, motherhood, and at the core of what it means to be a woman, Harrington fires a shot back at the progressives.   The book is almost perfectly time to throw a banana peel on the floor in front of the prancing Dylan Mulvaney.  Harrington pushes back so hard in fact, she takes womanhood back to pre-romantic days.

Harrington begins her heretical, heterodoxical book by announcing its very first line, “What started me down the path towards writing this book was feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby.”

This bold and unambiguous statement is a clear shot across the bow, aimed at feminists that have successfully detached themselves from their reproductive selves, through availability of birth control and, in many jurisdictions, having the right to terminate their pregnancy up to the moment of birth.  In this opening sentence, Harrington announces that she is about to take a sledgehammer to modern feminist thought.  There is no doubt that she would get booed off the stage at most U.S. college campuses for making such a statement.

Harrington’s views, it seems, involved a real life pivot.  She admits that she had been swept up in postmodernism and that she had a “visceral aversion to hierarchies.”   Like Bridget Phetasy, she apparently had a string of “loose, shifting, postmodern constellations of romantic entanglements” that she found unsatisfying.   At the same time, her startup business venture failed and the crash of ’08 caused her to re-evaluate her life, and her role as a woman.  It was then that she came to the conclusion that “Progress Theology,” the notion that things can only get better as women become more liberated was flawed, that the “pursuit of untrammeled freedom, mindless hedonism or the final victory of one sex over another” was a mirage.  (I also highly recommend the podcast discussion between Phetasy and Bret Weinstein on his Dark Horse Podcast of October 31, 2022 dealing with many of the same issues):

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS80MjQwNzUucnNz/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xMTYxMzIwOQ?ep=14

Having come to this conclusion, Harrington makes a number of astute observations about how we got to this point.   She is no Phyllis Schafley, nostalgic for the white picket fences and the Ozzie and Harriet 50’s. She goes much further.

She argues that during the industrial revolution, Big Romance (of the Jane Austen type) helped achieve a sort of balance between the sexes.  Men had a monopoly over economic resources and women had a monopoly over sexual resources.   But as we moved into the 60’s and 70’s with the ideas of Judith Butler’s ideas that sex and gender are social constructs taking hold, feminism began to cause a real cleavage between men and women.  As technology advanced, so did the atomization of women and commoditization of sex, beginning with the pill (and abortion), which separated sex from procreation.
“When individuals of both sexes really can just f**k, with no material consequences, what is even the point of going out to dinner first?” she decries.

What most resonated with me with Harrington’s book were two things.  First, her absolute bluntness confronting the madness of the moment.  Simple truthful statements such as, “It is physiologically impossible to gestate a baby without involving a woman” and her assertion that men and women have innate natures directly contradicts Butler’s premise and the wave sweeping over the country.

Second, Harrington’s position gives some context and intellectual heft behind some of the women that are active dissidents against the feminist movement--- authors Peachy Keenan (Catholic- 5 children and author of Domestic Terrorist, Bethany Mandel (Jewish – 6 children and co-author with Karol Markowitz of Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation).  Like Harrington, these women understand that motherhood—creating and nurturing human life is at the core of their being and purpose in life.  They understand that human flourishing for a woman does not hinge on liberating oneself from unchosen relationships and obligations, but often involves finding meaning in them. 

Harrington’s book helped me consolidate my thinking and some of the recent thoughts of others, like Yoram  Hazony in his book, Conservatism, A Rediscovery, in which he asserts that in Jewish doctrinal thought, having and nurturing children IS your purpose in life, and the earlier in life you get that started the better.   The life-giving aspect of sex was always a touchstone of Catholic doctrine.  It’s no coincidence that Peachy Keenan and Bethany Mandel have 11 children between them, and it’s also no accident that radical Leftists Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have none.

Harrington’s position that our roles need to be rolled back to pre-industrial society harkens back to one of my favorite old films of all time- Heartland with Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell (1979), where Torn hires Ferrell to help him homestead on the plains and they end up in a functional marriage, relying on each other to survive in harsh conditions.   There was not a lot of romance, just tackling challenges together and surviving in a harsh environment with no outside help. That scenario may be a bit extreme, but you get the point.

More writers like Harrington are coming around to see the false god of Butler’s feminism.  We do not become self-actualized when we are liberated from all non voluntarily chosen relationships.  Real adulthood and flourishing arises from taking responsibility and caring for another living being, primarily manifested in your own children.

 

Dump Trump?

It took me awhile to cotton to the idea of Donald Trump in the White House in 2016.  Like many, I was put off by his brash, vain and unpolished style.  But as a disaffected voter, I gave him a second look during the convention when he announced, “I am your voice.”   Like most Americans, I felt that Washington had become completely unmoored from the electorate and that the country needed someone that was not beholden to any particular interest group, someone that could shake things up.  And Trump delivered on a multitude of fronts, from curtailing the bureaucracy, to pushing back on China, to browbeating the Germans into stepping up their defense commitments, to killing Soliemeni, to the Abraham Accords, Trump showed some real moxi and courage to do some things that needed to be done.  His greatest gift was spotlighting the necrosis that had settled in D.C. and the toxicity of the press.   At the outset of Trum’s presidency, cartoonist Scott Adams correctly predicted that, “Trump will do a lot of things you like.  But it won’t be cost free.”  I was along for the ride, but fully expected to tire of him at some point.

I have tried very hard to view Trump differently and be neither an acolyte or a Trump hater, and assess his performance fairly and within a historical context.  It is enormously difficult to make fair judgments about him, as the media and the agencies distort and lie, and most of my friends and acquaintances fell into either camp.

Again, as this election cycle begins, I have  some misgivings about Trump, and I try to organize them here.

Age
While we are focused on the age and infirmity of Joe Biden, his obvious descent into dementia that is frightening given the challenges we face internationally, but Trump is 76.  I have great trepidation that we are descending into an ossified gerontocracy just as the Soviets did just before its collapse.  As someone that is north of 60, I understand that our job now is to prepare the next generation to take the reins.  It’s their country, or will be soon.  We are being led by Dementia Joe (80), Chuck Schumer (72), and until recently Nancy Pelosi (83).  Dianne Feinstein (89) is still clinging to her job as is Chuck Grassley(89).  While he is still vibrant and energetic, this nation seriously needs these elderly scions to step down and make room for the next generation. 

Personnel
This is a tough one because Trump, as an outsider, didn’t quite know who to trust, and he is particularly bad at hiring lawyers.   Five minutes with Michael Cohen should have been enough to determine that Cohen was something you would fish out of the bathtub drain trap.  Same for Anthony Scaramucci.  He also failed to fire people that he should have dismissed much, much earlier—Jim Mattis, for one.  And the most costly for Trump and the nation—Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Jim Comey.   Taken together, those three inflicted more harm on the country than a nuclear explosion in a medium sized city.

Perhaps one of Trump’s worst flaws is his failure to discern people to whom he owes some loyalty.  Sure, Jim Mattis, John Bolton and Bill Barr turned on him.  But he threw Michael Flynn to the wolves from the outset, and disparaged Steve Bannon (whether you like him or not).  His recent disparagement of Kayleigh McEnany.   She stood by him, was smart and well prepared, and faced the hyenas in the press corp day after day.  Trump had no business publicly rebuking her.

 

Discipline
Trump has very good instincts, especially in foreign policy.  But his lack of discipline has been very costly.  He picks fights with people that he doesn’t need to engage with.  He prides himself in being a great counterpuncher—and he is.  But the forces arrayed against him, especially in the security agencies are formidable and smart.   This most recent indictment was an unforced error.  Yes, this indictment is an aspect of the abuse of the justice system to derail a presidential candidate, but Trump opened the door with his carelessness.  As was his criticism of DiSantis for how Florida handled Covid.  Trump unnecessarily alienated white suburban women, a constituency that would likely have pushed him over the top in 2020 had he moderated just a bit.

So yes, these are defensible reasons to dump Trump.  And I’m sure there are others that I have missed.  As a fiscal conservative, I can also argue that he did not pay enough attention to spending and the deficit as I would have liked. 

But none of these possible objections matter now.  After the indictment of Trump, an obvious political move to take him off the game board, attempting to deprive the American citizens of making their own decisions on him.

It’s fair game to raise issues of Trump’s sloppy handling of some documents.  But to prosecute Trump for the same things Clinton has done, Obama has done, and Biden has done is a bridge too far.  And that’s only the beginning.  The Clinton influence peddling and money laundering through the Clinton Foundation, the Biden family corruption that took those techniques and raised them to a new level, filtering funds through a labyrinth of entities to enrich his family…and of course, the infamous Biden laptop.   Add to it the financing of BLM and Antifa and we can see that equal application of the law has completely broken down.

I am not alone.  There are millions of people like me, that see Trump’s positive attributes as well as his deficiencies.  The decision of whether to put him back in the White House belongs to us, not the Department of Justice, or any local petty DA.

As the jackals in the corrupt justice system, media and in his own party (Haley, Christie) circle to take him out, he may be the only leader strong enough to push back on the Deep State and the Marxism that have a stranglehold on D.C.   

In normal times, there would be enough reasons to turn to someone else.  Now is not that time. 

 

 

Turley v. Krazner

 There are precious few remaining forums where we can experience a frank exchange of views anymore.  Legacy media is completely devoid of balance.  There are a few podcasts that try- most notably Bari Weiss’s Honestly is probably one of the best, along with The Glenn Loury Show.  Of course, on most college campuses, divergent views are no longer welcome.

While Wokeness has made some inroads at The University of Chicago (it recently graced Critical Race Theory with its own department – Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity), it remains one of the few places where those conversations can take place in public.  Last weekend, I returned to campus at the University of Chicago for a debate between Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krazner (now being impeached by the Pennsylvania legislature) moderated by University of Chicago law professor Emily Underwood.  Before I get into some of the content, let me just say that for all my dismay over the direction of the school over the past three years, the discussion was conducted in a very civil and respectful manner.  Early on, a few in the audience made some noises but Underwood moderator was quick to tamp it down, and it did not recur.  Despite dipping its toes in the Wokeness waters, The University of Chicago more or less adheres to the Chicago Principles of Free Speech. Ms. Underwood remarked that, “The one thing that we can all agree on is that The University of Chicago changed all of us.”

Krazner opened by rationalizing the horrendous incident at Stanford a few weeks ago in which some Stanford law students shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan, with some students shouting such vile things at him as “I hope your daughter gets raped.”  In the incident the school’s DEI instructor took the microphone and admonished the judge, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”  In other words, was it worth having him speak?  Krazner trashed the Federalist Society (who sponsored the event), the judge for “taking away rights” and for his non-Ivy League credentials, stating “he has no business being on the 5^th circuit” and “doesn’t look judicial” and managed to smear Florida governor DiSantis along with him.  He reluctantly admitted a few students went too far but did not deserve suspension or expulsion.

Turley’s initial response was simply, “Wow” then went on calmly to admonish Krazner for rationalizations that go back centuries.  There is a long history of making excuses for silencing others.  “Speech is harmful” allows for endless tradeoffs ending in the government’s labeling of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (true speech used to mislead).  Turley’s flat declaration was that the solution to bad speech is good speech.  He considers the current attack on free speech to be the greatest threat to the country.  He characterized Krazner’s core argument as “the students went too far but it was his [Duncan’s] fault.

Turley said that we were living in an “age of rage” but that rage is addictive, giving us a license to silence others.  This country was born in rage and silencing others is a troubling trend.  It is the most intolerant environment he has ever seen.  On almost all college campuses, conservative and libertarian faculty, which were always in the minority, have been largely excluded entirely. 

Krasner further downplayed the Stanford incident, claiming that an incident is not a trend.  But Turley shot back that there have been many than one incident and he tracks them.  The data do no support Krasner’s defense.

Krazner then attacked the Supreme Court itself, with a claim that the court is taking back rights, that it has become polarized and politicized, and people have lost a lot of faith in the court.  He cited “absurd” decisions about the 2^nd Amendment and railed about not adhering to precedent and kicking stare decisis to the curb.  He complained about the undue influence of the Federalist Society on the court and the “trickery” that was used to keep Merrick Garland off the bench. 

Turley countered by stating that he had a lot of faith in the system, that Krazner misportrays the court. In the vast majority of the cases, the decisions are unanimous.  “The justices are not robotic idealogues,” he said., “Furthermore, we want judges to be intellectually consistent.”   He disagreed with the characterization of the court taking away rights.  Rather, these decisions involve collisions of rights.  As the stare decisis, he commented tongue in cheek that “thankfully Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) is still good law.”  He reminded Krazner that the Warren Court overturned 30 precedents and no one at the time claimed that was a threat to democracy.

My bias clearly is in favor of Turley and I make the following observations about the program:

·        Turley went out of his way to express his fidelity to the Constitution, rather than a political party.  “I haven’t liked a president since Madison.”  Turley did not even mention Biden and only mentioned Trump in the context of discussions of the appropriateness of impeachment.as a remedy (Turley, by the way, opposes Krazner's impeachment).  At no point did Turley disparage “liberals” or Democrats as a whole or any members of the Supreme Court.  He went out of his way to make complimentary comments about Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.  Krazner, on the other hand, ripped into the Federalist Society, and the right wing of the court. His account of the incident at Stanford in which he smeared Judge Duncan and excused the Stanford law students for the shoutdown was utterly disingenuous. Duncan had a right to speak without the “heckler’s veto.”  Period.

·        Krazner boasted that he was the first progressive DA (Soros) and that the progressive DA’s now serve 20% of the U.S. population and will soon expand to 30%.  He rambled on about the criminal justice complex, claiming that in areas like Pennsylvania which lost its steel industry, that has been replaced by the prison industry, disproportionately affecting blacks.   He conveniently failed to address the crime surge in his district and the excess deaths by violence as a consequence of his posture.

Later in the day, I ran into Turley at the bookstore and had an opportunity to have a chat with him, and I thanked him for his work on free speech matters.  He completed my “world tour” of free speech scholars – Turley, Nadine Strosser (formely of ACLU) and Jason DiSanto (Northwestern).

And while I enjoyed speaking with Turley, the most interesting conversation I had that afternoon was with a HVAC technician.   As I returned to my car, I passed two maintenance guys- a white 50ish fellow having a cigarette break and a 30 something black fellow.  They saw my alumni badge and the older fellow said “Welcome back.”  So I stopped and engaged them in conversation for a bit.  The older fellow had to take a call and I continued with the younger guy, and we talked about careers.  I told him I was less committed to college as the right path as I once was and he lit up and told me about his own journey.  He went to a Chicago Public High School (CVS) and grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes.  He talked about the fact that CPS stopped offering vocational classes and he thought that was a huge mistake, “Why go to college when you can become an apprentice, make money right away and not have loans to deal with?”  We talked for a good half hour about this.  I felt so encouraged by this conversation.  I had more in common with this young black man from the projects than I did with the smug, bombastic Larry Krazner.  

The civilized debate between Turley and Krazner and the conversation with young maintenance guy left me with more hope than I have felt in awhile.  Free speech survives in this redoubt, along with a bright young man from the projects that now has a bright future in front of him.

Off the Stage

 They’re shuffling off the stage.  Finally.  CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley announced within weeks of each other that they are leaving their posts soon.  It couldn’t come soon enough.   Both of these people that rose to high rankings represent the worst of American leadership since Aaron Burr. Together, they did enormous damage to the Republic.  It is not hyperbolic to suggest that they should both be in prison for their actions.

Rochelle Walensky
Rochelle Walensky took over for Robert Redfield in January of 2021- about a year into the pandemic.  An early advocate of the vaccines, she falsely claimed that if you took the jab, you wouldn’t get it and couldn’t transmit the virus.  Playing fast and loose with data, she failed to distinguish deaths caused by COVID and deaths with COVID.  Caving to pressure from teachers unions, Walensky advocated school shutdowns as well. 

One of my first impressions of Walensky came in March of 2021, as she addressed the nation in a halting voice, barely holding back tears,

“I’m going to pause here. I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring  feeling of impending doom.  We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential where we are, and so much reason for hope.  But right now, I’m scared.”

My immediate reaction was, “What kind of leadership is that?”

What followed throughout her tenure was data distortion, flat out lies about the efficacy of the jab and policy recommendations that de facto had the weight of law that inflicted devastation on our business community, our education system, the military, and the mental health of tens of millions of Americans. We still don’t have a good number reflecting how many individuals died from COVID, rather than with COVID.

Most notoriously, Walensky asserted that vaccinated individuals could not transmit the virus, and that was patently untrue.  Her CDC advocated vaccinations for children and healthy young people while ignoring the evidence that myocarditis resulting from the vaccine was more of a risk for young men than the virus. 

Walensky will never be held accountable for her lies, distortions and bad calls.  The damage she inflicted on our society will linger for generations.

Mark Milley
While Rochelle Walensky inflicted incredible harm to our society, particularly our youth, Mark Milley damaged our standing in the world, emboldened our enemies, and, in an act of treason, upended the chain of command.   Like Walensky, he will never be held accountable.  Our enemies are now laughing at us. 

Milley jumped into the political fray in 2020 when he accompanied President Trump to the burned out St. John’s church after mobs nearly stormed the White House, then issued a statement saying that he regretted it, and should not have been there.  His caving to political pressure was the first sign that all is not well with the military top brass.

The most egregious blunder was his admission that he had placed a call to his Chinese counterpart to tell him that he would give him a heads up if Trump ordered an attack because the Chinese were worried about a U.S. attack.  He also blocked Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons.   In our system of government, those are not Milley’s calls to make. His job is not to de-escalate with the Chinese.  His job is to serve the commander in chief.   No one elected him.   Subverting the chain of command is a treasonous offense, plain and simple.  In an earlier era, Milley would have faced a firing squad instead of a fat pension.

His statements about “white rage,” permitting drag queens to perform on military bases, and his halt of operations so that the military could purge “extremists” belied a top brass more interested in being Woke than defending the nation.

Milley’s judgment was borne out by his results.  He said he was surprised that the Afghan army folded so quickly.  Well, Mr. Milley, we pay you not to get surprised by military developments.  That is a vital aspect of the job.  Of course, there is the matter of leaving billions worth of equipment on the ground to be picked up and used by the Taliban and bartered in the international arms trade. His second mistake in judgment was assuming that Kiev would fold in a matter of weeks.  Here we are, over a year later and the Ukrainians have held off Putin’s forces so far.

Permitting the Chinese spy balloon to traverse the U.S. skies unharassed, collecting sensitive military data was his last most pusillanimous act.  American citizens were nonplussed as reports came in and people actually saw it, and the military did nothing until it had completed its mission and was over the Atlantic. Of course, the administration offered a variety of excuses for its inaction but the fact remains that neither China or Russia would have permitted this over their territory.

The consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal and Chinese spy balloon debacles will take a generation to remediate, if they ever can be, thanks to Milley.   But Milley will suffer no adverse consequences from the harm he has caused.

When history is written, historians will undoubtedly record these two, along with the notorious Anthony Fauci, as the three actors that did the most damage to the American experiment.   And if America does indeed crumble, they will be seen as some of the major architects of its demise.

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.