After presenting an alternative reality in which pro-lifers spoke in the manner of climate-change alarmists, Grayson Quay writes:
Our progressive elites have no qualms about advancing their agenda through extralegal means. For them, illegal immigration, anti-police rioting, and even light eco-terrorism are all examples of what John Lewis would call ‘good trouble.’ If legal maneuverings won’t get them what they want, the mob will. Like Machiavelli’s ideal Prince, they’re equally adept as fox and lion.
“The only real difference” between the sides, he writes, “is that one movement reflects an officially sanctioned ideology and the other does not.”
This state of affairs can’t last. Either those who get away with murder rhetorically will escalate to doing so in fact or the restraint of their opposition will fall away.
All you moderates who think people like Dr. Skoly need to turn your calls for moderation toward the actual aggressors.
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There was Aaron Regunberg, up there at Harvard Law, thinking he’d take a step away from Rhode Island politics for a bit to further mine his white privilege for career gold when the political pieces started to move of their own volition. As he writes in the Boston Globe:
Many members of Rhode Island’s progressive movement have expressed concerns about [the Rhode Island Political Cooperative’s] choice to target a highly effective ally like Euer. But the story became even darker this week, when The Boston Globe reported that RIPC’s handpicked candidate against Euer, Jennifer Jackson, has a history of appallingly rightwing views and statements.
Another well-known radical in the Ocean State, union organizer Patrick Crowley, likewise expressed his vexation with those upstarts in the coop:
Crowley argued that it’s hypocritical for the co-op to run candidates such as Jackson and Battle “under the progressive banner” while challenging Democrats such as Euer, who sponsored the Act on Climate, and Alzate, who sponsored a bill to raise Rhode Island’s top income tax rate from 5.99 percent to 8.99 percent.
“I don’t see what’s progressive about targeting legislators who are trying to tax the rich,” Crowley said. “The troubling thing here, from my point of view, is they seem to take the position that only one organization has the right to define what a progressive is, and I think it’s counterproductive to the goals of what the larger progressive movement in Rhode Island is trying to accomplish.”
By “larger progressive movement,” he means himself and his establishment friends who have been busily laundering taxpayer money into their movement and their own pockets (through union dues and other channels) for years. And by finding it “troubling” that “only one organization has the right to define what a progressive is,” he means the definition of progressive must be narrow enough to match his extreme beliefs.
The immediate distinction between the factions, here, appears to be that Matt Brown’s RIPC put a greater emphasis on opposing State House leaders, whereas Regunberg and Crowley appreciate adherence to the established progressive platform. Socialilsts like state senator Sam Bell may manage to keep a straight face while insisting that legislative leaders are conservative, but the reality is that there are simply degrees among progressives in the amount that they’re willing to put on a more-moderate face for the camera and push their ideology incrementally. Predictably, willingness to do that correlates with ability to take positions of central power.
What we see, therefore, is just the spectrum. House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi will go so far as to listen to moderates so he has a sense of how hard he can push without an unexpected explosion of the progressive trend. Representative Karen Alzate will go so far as to recognize Shekarchi as the best progressives can do for speaker just now. Crowley and Regunberg are positioned such that they can make more-progressive noises in order to herd true believers and doubters in their preferred direction.
Their problem is that there are great gushing veins of out-of-state progressive money for those willing to push harder, and a generation of young activists was indoctrinated to believe that everything is an urgent issue that must be addressed now for the sake of the universe, which creates opportunity for a new generation of revolutionary upstarts within the radicals’ ranks.
Featured image by Peter John Maridable on Unsplash.
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In the Reuters article I mentioned the other day, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was so bold as to say this:
“We are going to look to work with our allies to counteract China’s anticompetitive behavior,” Raimondo said. “That’s a big difference between the last administration’s approach and our administration’s approach.”
She said tariffs on steel and aluminum imposed by the Trump administration “worked” to increase U.S. production but said the national security tariffs imposed on allies was not “necessarily the right way to go…It was really irritating to Europeans and now we’ve got to, like, clean that up… The enemy of course isn’t Europeans. The enemy is excess supply of cheap steel being dumped by China into Europe.”
Well, here’s the reality:
French President Emmanuel Macron stressed that Europe must distance itself from the United States as relations between America and its allies continue to deteriorate under the regime of Democrat President Joe Biden.
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The profundity of the situation didn’t come home to me until I was nearly done researching and writing this article for Accuracy in Media. I set out to shed some light on the partisan donations of NowThis News founder Kenneth Lerer (which the article does), but what I started to see in that light was this:
While his political donation pledge may not have amounted to bribery, the overlapping investment, media, and political strategies of Kenneth Lerer raise serious questions, given the current landscape of laws around political donations and donor disclosure, not to mention concerns about misinformation on social media.
Are the activities of his companies not political donations because they are designed to make money? Is the clear path to helpful coverage and direct donations for politicians willing to tow Lerer’s line not bribery because his personal profits align with his ideology? Do the videos posted by NowThis evade electioneering-disclaimer laws because they’re presented as infotainment rather than as political ads?
What struck me was that Lerer isn’t scheming so much as evolving. He’s simply pursing his interests to make money and to do something he sees as good in the world. He’s innovating technologically and in system design in a natural process of problem solving.
Innovation, like evolution, is a natural force responding to desires and incentives. You can’t really stop it, although you can try to suppress it, probably at great cost and risk. Your options are to (1) get people to stop wanting what they want, (2) find a way to cleverly redirect their momentum toward less-harmful ends, or (3) outdo them in innovation to stay a step ahead in the same game.
Take blogs. Voices locked out of contribution to mainstream news and commentary innovated to find an audience in more or less the same narrative-building game. Soon after our actions began to have a substantial effect on the culture and politics, social media emerged and redirected that momentum into cultural superficialities, while also putting the political commentary under the soon-to-become censorious control of a few tech giants.
We have to start thinking about the next steps. My article on NowThis points toward the probability that the social media story is merging with the campaign finance and donor disclosure story. We don’t have the power to stop these trends. Can we change minds about their wisdom? Can we cleverly redirect the elites’ momentum toward some end that will ultimately thwart them? Or do we have to innovate a way out of this?
Featured image from Superman 3 clip on YouTube.
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What sort of chemicals do they have in the water up in New Hampshire?
In a recent opinion piece for the LaCross Tribune, Frank Edelblut, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education, posed what some vaccine-focused health officials on the COVID-19 front lines might call a radical idea: Why not work on getting healthy to fight COVID-19?
… He cited studies showing that COVID-19 patients with a range of comorbidities are more at risk for getting COVID-19, having a severe case of it, and even dying.
And most of the comorbidities are diseases directly connected with poor lifestyle choices, beginning with obesity, which he said is “the top health condition contributing to death with a 30 percent higher chance of death.”
Have you noticed that the state of RI thinks it’s important to track the sexual orientation of people who get COVID-19, but not, say, the prior health or comorbidities? Making a certain body mass index an alternative to vaccination might be win-win.
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The U.S. District Court for our area has refused to stop the state from enforcing its vaccine mandate as the affected healthcare workers’ lawsuit proceeds. In practical terms, this means that the burden of the disagreement will fall on those workers forced out of their jobs during that time, rather than on the government.
A lawyer might remind them that temporary restraining orders are a high bar and all is not lost, but in politicized cases, that resonates more as an attempt to keep hope alive than to evaluate the prospects of success. The workers should be very skeptical that the courts in New England will fall on the side of freedom, regardless of how the law ought to apply. The principle that liberty is the American default has been flipped on its head; when government wants to do something — which is to say, when the people with power want to do something — the burden falls on individuals (often at great expense) to prove that it cannot.
To be sure, the people involved probably don’t think they’re participating in the erasure of the United States as the exception to the tyrannical rule, but at this level, it’s awfully easy for the subconscious to rationalize. From the perspective of a very significant percentage of people (even in New England), the response to COVID-19 was a terrible overreach that did tremendous damage to our health, the economy, and our civic structures. Think of the psychological, intellectual, and political repercussions if those people with power acknowledged this reality! The vaccines offer a path out of these thorny brambles without having to acknowledge that it was panicky injustice to force us to crawl through them in the first place.
Judges are part of the class that shares incentive to insist on that path, whether consciously or subconsciously.
This leaves the freedom loving with nothing but people power, but there’s reason for concern, here, as well. As noted in this space, healthcare workers have been following the example of progressives in blocking traffic. This approach is scheduled to continue with a protest at Governor Dan McKee’s house, with organizers planning to leave shoes at his step so “he has to acknowledge us when he has to clean them up.”
The response of government will be important to watch. Will authorities crack down on littering when they looked the other way for protests that were closer to rioting last year?
Even if our governing elite accepts the right of Rhode Islanders to protest for non-woke causes, however, the dynamic is different. When radicals do these things, their populist performances create space and pressure to pull officials who generally agree with them farther to the left. When conservatives (or just people who are fighting for liberty) do them, we’ve got a much higher bar: getting government to act against its interests and beliefs.
In the long run, that’s going to require changing the people in government — not just, as we learned with President Trump, elected officials, but the layers of functionaries in the bureaucracy, and even non-government institutions like the news media. That’s a long, sustained effort, and while I desperately want to be proven wrong, I’m skeptical, here, too.
If the healthcare workers lose in court, does their protest build into a movement or go away? Well, some will get vaccinated. Some (to my knowledge) are already moving to other states. Some will find other work. So, how big is the remainder? And how politically credible?
Thus, tyranny simply rolls over freedom, because it’s so much easier and more natural for the people to allow themselves to be smoothed under its wheels. Stopping this is the great puzzle of our time.
Featured image by Emanuel Leutze on WikiArt.
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When I read this Daily Wire article by Joseph Curl, I was expecting to find a surprising change of tone by Saturday Night Live — one that treated our eminently mockable politicians as such. Honestly, I don’t know what Curl was watching.
Granted, I didn’t get through the whole clip, but the first two-thirds remained standard SNL fare. Yes, Democrats were mocked, but it was the moderate Democrats. Yes, the actor tried to capture some of Biden’s mannerisms, but he completely ignores the old-man-don’t-know-where-he-is vibe and missed the mark completely with the level of energy displayed. Worse, when it came down to a comparison, the progressives were portrayed as the ones wanting compromise, while Senators Manchin and Sinema are handled as a child-labor-supporting fool (played by a woman) and a nut whose strategy is entirely to issue ridiculous proclamations. They even mocked Sinema’s non-straight sexuality.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- RI GOP headed toward a gubernatorial primary
- Cranston dentist headed toward a clash with RI
- Healthcare workers clashing with McKee
- Progressives clash with each other and moderate Dems
Featured image by Piero della Francesca on WikiArt.
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Christine Rousselle’s Catholic News Agency article about a push for assisted suicide in Massachusetts brings out an important element in the debate. Support for the policy tends to come from the progressive-elite end of the spectrum, while disadvantaged and disabled groups tend to see it as a threat (rightly, I’d say).
The implicit rationale is that the advantaged think life would not be worth living if they faced challenges or lost (what they perceive as) total control of their lives, which they can’t help but apply, on some level, to people who live with those challenges already. “I’d rather die” can too easily transform into “by what right do they live.”
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Michael Morse reframes some of the more-strident pro-vaccination rhetoric to illustrate how it appears to the other side:
You cringe when you hear one of them speak out, you shut them down, ignore them, and secretly hope they get sick, and with any luck, die. It serves them right. Probably Trump supporters anyway, and we all know those people are racist, homophobic misogynistic fools.
It’s undeniable that such feelings are part of the picture. The whole public-health campaign (in government, news media, and elsewhere) would be conducted very differently if it had been developed from a mindset of respect for others.
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