Jordan Peterson has this right, but the darkness of the fact needs to be emphasized:
We’ve been seeing teens charged with felonies for riding over these sections of road disrespectfully, even as Hamas supporters get away with defacing statues. It’s obvious we’re being demanded to treat these symbols with reverence, as if they’re the state religion, but this religion has an important, tyrannical difference.
I wouldn’t want an image of our Lord painted on the street precisely because it couldn’t do otherwise than be defaced. These people paint their sacred symbols on the road explicitly so that they can force people to treat them gingerly. They even put up cameras to keep a watch for transgressors.
In keeping with the notion of “pride” as a high virtue to be celebrated, the purpose is to be in your face while making you take off your shoes and bow down. This is the deepest form of tyranny.
[Open full post]
I’ve been pondering Joe Biden’s stated belief that Americans have no standing to complain about illegal immigrants’ raping American women because we rape our own brothers and sisters in the home. It’s tempting to hope he’s just a rambling old man who can no longer construct coherent thoughts (whatever that might mean for the fact that he’s also in charge of the most powerful government in human history), but recalling this recent poll, I’m not so sure he isn’t representative of his party:
The thing is, even rambling old men tend to stay within the boundaries of what they think constitutes a reasonable point for their audience. Whether they’re responding to their own dysfunctional experience or the false reality into which they’ve been indoctrinated, Democrats have become the antifamily party. Many disagree, no doubt, and many more will change with the wind of social change, but that’s a defining theme of the party.
Faced with a movement that is so self-hating and intrinsically destructive of a healthy society, Americans should wipe them out, politically, from the top of the ballot to the bottom.
[Open full post]
What a silly cartoon this is:
If the position for which they’re selecting involves climbing, then this exam is dead on. Ignoring context and purpose for the sake of identity-group parity is a DEI sleight of hand.
[Open full post]
It shouldn’t have come as a shock. The surprise would have been if there were drugs strong enough to make Biden’s debate performance even passable. He is not running the government and probably hasn’t been since he took office.
The partisans and anti-Trumpers are still trying to shoehorn their lust for power into the idea that “Trump lied,” even though Biden’s stream of lies was as obvious and brazen as his pretense could articulate them clearly.
My critique of Trump’s performance (at least in the highlights I’ve watched) was that he didn’t sufficiently explain the areas of Democrats’ greatest deceit. He did some of that, to be sure, but the split screen with blank-faced Joe on one side was a tremendous opportunity to go point-by-point with evidence for all those “swing voters” who aren’t really swing voters, but rather simply can’t admit to themselves that they’ve been deeply deceived by Democrats.
Of course, there are multiple audiences, and the campaign may have a better handle on which it must reach. So, I’ll content myself with succinctly laying out my take on the political situation.
In 2020, Democrats leveraged the chaos of the pandemic to cheat a man into office despite his obviously accelerating mental decline because they (1) hated having an anti-establishmentarian in the White House and (2) knew the imminent recovery from pandemic shutdowns would be a huge warm wind in the sales of the party in power.
With Biden in office, they trampled over Americans and our institutions to implement radical policies that would change the culture, ensconce ideological allies, and ensure their continuing power, especially by opening the borders. As Biden’s condition has worsened to the embarrassing point that our world allies’ most-pressing duty is to join in the fraud and babysit him during photo-ops, Democrats have ramped up their gaslighting to surreality and turned our justice system into a political weapon.
The panic we’re seeing now may indicate, for many, that they simply can’t lie to themselves enough to buy the party’s spin any longer, but the dread at the heart of the party is a decision its rein-holders have to make.
If our system of government were operating properly, Joe Biden would (belatedly) resign today, but that would make Kamala Harris the head of the Democrat Party and unshakable as its candidate for President. Her unpopularity and undeniable lack of qualifications mean the party has to force her to exit with Biden, one way or another.
But even the cult-like devotion of Democrats could be torn apart by an attempt to switch out the names (and factions) on the ballot. If this were fiction, it would be amusing to ponder whether a party so invested in identity politics would be better off switching out one woman of color for another (Michelle Obama) or running back to the safe embrace of a photogenetic white man (Gavin Newsom). Alternatively, would Americans buy the come-back of a woman they despised so much that Trump beat her in the first place (Hillary Clinton)?
Meanwhile, none of this works reliably without unity at the highest levels, and the psychopathic Biden family, with all its legal vulnerability, is not likely to exit gracefully, not least because they cannot trust even their own party not to scapegoat them into prison, or at least historical calumny.
Although the Democrats could fraud whomever they wish into office, the scam must have at least a modicum of plausibility, and they can’t risk rifts within the ring of people who can expose the treason. Their every action will be done in the glaring spotlight of Biden’s performance, and the prior propaganda it exposed, and with the knowledge of all that they’ve already done, by which an aggressive member of the opposing party could end them simply by turning on the public lights.
Say what we like about Jon Stewart’s attempt to ham his way past his role in our condition, we shouldn’t (only) mock his cry of despair that “this cannot be real life.” Biden laid bare that we do, indeed, live in a world in which the ruling party, the bureaucracy, the news media, the intelligence agencies, and even the otherwise disputatious leaders of our European allies will conspire to hide the truth from us. This is a world in which systemic election fraud in “the world’s greatest democracy” is not only plausible, but to be expected.
If this read is accurate, the panic and dread are merely the surface manifestations of the deeper emotion of people battling with their consciences, asking themselves just how far they are willing to go.
Featured image from The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons.
[Open full post]
Consider two general principles of political theory while reading this:
1) Government starts by telling the people how much money it needs and then proceeds to collect it, not the other way around.
2) The less competitive political races are, the more incentive those who are predictably elected have to spend money on corruption and return to ask for more for the basic services that affect everyday life.
I’ve been railing for years against the public policy inclination coming down from the state Department of Education to have schools actively lie to parents about their children’s expressed gender identity. Social media can sometimes give the impression that the tide is turning, and it may be, but we should expect progressive strongholds in Rhode Island to be the last to abandon genuflection to radical idols, even when doing so violates parental rights and harms children.
Nicole Solas recently reminded us of this unfortunate reality by reporting that the Barrington School Committee is still marching down this path. Here’s the committee’s relevant language:
Secondary School Students: if school staff believe that a gender identity issue is presenting itself and creating challenges for a student at school, or if the student or parent(s)/guardian(s) of a student indicates an intention, the school should make every effort to work with the student. Generally, notification to a student’s parent(*s)/guardian(s) about their gender identity, expression, or transition is unnecessary, as they are already aware and supportive. However, some transgender students do not want their parents to know about their transgender status. These situations must be addressed on a case-by-case basis and require schools to balance the goal of supporting the student with the desire that parents be informed about their students. In these circumstances, the school administration will ask the superintendent for direction on how to proceed, as soon as the secondary student makes the request for non-disclosure to a parent or guardian. If the administration in collaboration with the superintendent determines that notifying the family carries risks for the student, they should work closely with the student to assess the degree to which, if any, the family will be involved in the process and must consider the age, health, well-being, and safety of the student. The superintendent will receive a copy of any safety plans or gender support plans resulting.
The overall conceit that the school department has this right is bad enough, but two details really drive home the affront.
First, notice that the starting point to initiate this process can come from school staff, as a separate origin than a child’s stated preferences: “if school staff believe that a gender identity issue is presenting itself and creating challenges for a student at school.” So, if a teacher, coach, janitor, or whoever somehow diagnoses a “gender identity issue,” “the school should make every effort to work with the student” to resolve it.
Second, notice the complete lack of due process or experts. The policy requires no psychological evaluation by an outside professional or legal review granting permission to interfere with the parent-child relationship. Basically, the principal and superintendent decide, with no way for parents to find out, seek second opinions (say, from actual doctors), or to seek redress if they discover the imposition and object.
In other words, this is not truly a serious policy to help children while keeping carefully within the bounds of each party’s rights. It’s an ideological subversion, and anybody with children in a school district that sees its authority in this way should remove them as quickly as possible.
Barrington has long been one of two towns to which realtors have steered wealthier out-of-state house seekers, largely because of the school system, but in the past decade or so, it has been taken over by progressives. Residents can be sure that the schools will happily indoctrinate and even medicate their children with or without their knowledge and hire teachers and administrators eager to do the job.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40.
[Open full post]
This ad for Rhode Island’s CollegeBound Saver fund promotion looks like a sleazy investment ad because it is:
Around $22 million in administrative fees from the program go to the private companies that handle the money and the state. This isn’t necessarily corruption, per se, but we can put it in the questionable bucket of non-governmental activities in which our state government engages.
When the government is involved as a player in a market, citizens have reason to question whether its policies across the board are less focused on the general welfare than on the government’s offering or the health of the markets in which it’s dabbling. A healthy democracy requires clarity of roles, and such programs obscure them.
[Open full post]
I’ll stipulate that comedian Sebastian Maniscalco’s story about a kindergartener who identifies as a lion is likely not true, but the exaggeration provides a useful framing, nonetheless:
One of the kill-move cheats of progressives is to pose the question, of these identity politics instances, “How does it affect you?” Appealing to Americans’ live-and-let-live sensibility, that theme arguably won the day for the same-sex marriage movement.
It’s psychological manipulation and a rhetorical trick, though, because it holds things at a superficial and momentary level. If this particular lion is disrupting class, then he simply has to be tamed; it can’t be taken (advocates would say) as a condemnation of all human-lions. If other students are distracted simply by the fact of the presence of a lion-identifier, then they simply have to get over it. If all students begin insisting that they are their favorite animals, then the adults simply should accept that there’s no harm in that.
Even these silly arguments are a distraction, though. If a kindergartener’s classmate can identify as a lion, with everybody required to play along, it becomes impossible to teach unequivocally that lions are dangerous, and there’s sometimes justification for shooting them. To be sure, American kindergarteners are exceedingly unlikely to encounter a real lion that can reach them, but the point is that we make distinctions for important reasons, even if the average person can’t articulate them on the spot.
[Open full post]
A theme one picks up from podcast discussions with cognitive scientists is that much of our perception — what we understand as real — is a matter of our choices about what we don’t pay attention to. A fully capable human has five senses, all of which are constantly sending more data to the nervous system than we can (or want to) consciously consider, so we emphasize different senses, turned in different directions, focused on different aspects of the things we’re observing, and interpreting what we do let through in terms of the stories by which we organize our understanding.
Believing that consciousness is the experience of a relationship with God from moment to moment, I’ve summarized the idea theologically with a few lines of poetry:
Though through sin’s haze we strain to see,
God shows himself as we attend:
by when eyes look, what minds perceive,
where feet do bear, what acts portend.
This fact is starkly observable in the politics of our day, where the difference between Republican and Democrat, conservative and progressive, and engaged and disengaged has become a matter of what facts actually exist. Just this week, for instance, the left-leaning “fact checking” website, Snopes, acknowledged that “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’.” Anybody who took five minutes to review the claim back in August 2017 — seven years ago! — would have known this to be the case, yet Joe Biden ostensibly ran for president based on the partisan lie.
Many such instances exist, and while most active partisans probably know it’s deception, many Democrat voters do not. Between these two are people who uphold degrees of the principle of “inaccurate, but true.” They rationalize this instance of lying because they believe it crystalizes something more deeply true about Trump, which they hold to be true as a matter of faith, but of which the slippery salesman has managed to avoid concrete evidence.
One consequence of living in different realities — even in the ordinary sense that humanity always does, because each of us attends to Creation from a different perspective — can be seen in game strategy. The winning team, whether in politics, sports, business, or any other arena, often succeeds by acting rigorously to execute a plan that the losing team does not recognize until it’s too late. The losers are reacting to a reality that is not true.
Now look out upon the current political landscape and tell me what you think the acts portend. Stories for each of the following items can easily be found, so I won’t provide links to each; I’m describing a perspective, not martialing evidence:
- Lenient district attorneys and judges let some protesters go (on American campuses and during elite-approved riots) while prosecuting others beyond reason (whether MAGA or pro-life).
- Some politicians get special treatment despite corruption (like all leading Democrats), while others see novel legal theories fired at them like a litigative shotgun blast.
- For favored criminals, parole terms are eased
- Illegal immigration is encouraged
- The attempt to restrict our right to self-defense through all means other than a Constitutional Amendment is relentless.
- The laws of which you’re supposed to be aware multiply beyond the ability of any human being to follow.
- Words can now mean anything at all, and change with the needs of the moment.
- The very same action or opinion by one person is a travesty, while it’s the height of moral rigor from another.
Where do these facts — which I hold them to be — all point? To a system in which the only thing that’s really illegal is being out of favor with the regime. Beyond the gaslighting, “benevolent” nudging, psychological manipulation, deep canvassing, propaganda, and plain ol’ lies, this fundamental goal stands out as the objective.
What this realization means for the team that’s currently on the defensive, I’m not sure, but the first step is acknowledging that we see it, so we at least be responding to the reality that the Machiavellians live by.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40 and Photoshop.
[Open full post]
It still seems like a waste of resources, to me. Here’s his tweet from May, when he announced his continuing fundraising:
There’s no pressure, here. Once people have that initial burst of “right on” feeling, such billboards become part of the background. When I looked into billboards years ago, they were about $10,000 per month. Two months of that would fund a sizable grant for investigative work or other human activity that would genuinely keep the pressure on, whether by unearthing new information or engaging in activism.
[Open full post]