As people newly look up from their lives to wonder about the craziness with which we’re surrounded — from collegiate support for Hamas to economic ignorance to scientific illiteracy to an inability to grapple with logic — they should turn their gaze toward our schools. Consider this recent Boston Globe column from Dan McGowan:
The state’s most recent report card shows that 81 percent of students [at Providence’s Mount Pleasant High School] were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year, zero percent of students were considered proficient in math, and the four-year graduation rate was 67 percent.
But here’s the worst part: McGowan puts those numbers forward to support one side over the other in a dispute over school building construction. In other words, the discussion is miles and miles away from where it ought to be, which is the use of our education to provide a jobs program for labor unions and indoctrinate into progressive causes.
The building won’t matter until that’s fixed, and it’s not even a topic of conversation.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Gabe Amo undermines the purpose of debates
- Matt Gaetz takes Congress in a Rhode Islandish direction
- Cranston’s council election results offer a red flag for the future
- Magaziner’s support for “Eat the Rich”
- Middle East atrocities and progressive revelations
Featured image by Justin Katz using Firefly.
True enough that it’s important to be skeptical of all reports, particularly the most horrific, at a time like this, but still… there is an air around some of those insisting that the story is not yet verified that implies if this story isn’t true, the whole atrocity is not that bad. Psychologically, they seem to hope for excessive accusations so that they can discount anything below that mark as within tolerable bounds of unspeakable horror.
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… the explanation might be more than silent discomfort with a faction of their tribe’s doing something nakedly evil. To progressives, this sort of thing must happen and is expected. Maybe they find it lamentable (or maybe not), but they see it as inevitable on the path to their vision of justice.
Tom Holland argues, in his excellent history of Christianity, Dominion, that the Woke represent a distorted offshoot of the faith. Just so, through their Marxist perversion, they carry forward the expectation for which Jesus prepared his followers: “when you hear of wars and revolts, do not be alarmed; for these things must take place first.”
This is the deeper truth of their hypocritical responses to current events. The revolution is everything, and they’ll respond the same when it comes for you. The real question is whether enough people’s eyes are opened before it’s too late, and I’m not seeing it, even now. So, the progressives will go about their lives… and wait.
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Whether it’s deliberate manipulation or just a sloppy resort to groupthink, Nancy Lavin’s recent article on Rhode Island Current is a good illustration of how issues can be framed to support the preferences of the powerful. Note this section:
Proponents tout these expansions as ways to improve voter turnout and access while easing the pressure on election administrators on Election Day itself.
But getting voters to embrace those changes remains a work in progress.
Distrust of mail-in ballots continues, thanks in part to misinformation spread during the 2020 presidential election.
Astonishingly, Lavin goes on to cite mail-ballot-queen Ana Quezada’s campaign manager, Justin Roias, as an expert, but without bothering to find anybody with a contrary view.
In particular, note the framing. Innovations in voting are simply “ways to improve voter turnout and access while easing pressure on election administrators.” See, it’s just a practical change to encourage civic engagement, and suspicion of these innovations has to do with “misinformation,” meaning Donald Trump and those wicked MAGA Republicans.
Apart from failing to include alternative views, Lavin doesn’t check basic facts from the activists. For instance, one claim by which Roias minimizes his candidate’s peculiar mail-ballot success is that “Quezada’s supporters were older and may have had mobility or transportation limitations,” but the mail ballot data doesn’t support his suggestion, and it’s easy to check.
Data from the Secretary of State’s office shows that the average age of mail-ballot voters is 67. In precincts in which Quezada had a majority of mail ballot votes, it’s 59. Looking at ballots that appear to have been picked up by her husband, the average age is 51. Make of these facts what you will; I offer them as one example of a statement an obviously biased source provided that the journalist did not verify.
As with every issue on which journalists appear to take the progressive, Democrat point of view for granted, one gets the feeling that they find the “distrust” from the other side to be inexplicable because they’ve declined to investigate whether it’s justified.
Featured image by Paulette Vautour on Unsplash.
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A recent teapot tempest in the Censorship Wars (at least the skirmishes over keeping arguably pornographic and sex-promoting work out of elementary school libraries) has to do with parents’ objecting to a graphic novel version of Ann Frank’s diary. You can dig multiple layers into the story, though, for a more-full picture.
The first layer, which is the one I’ve seen sympathetic parents offering, is to note that the graphic novel includes sections in which Anne fantasized about kissing her friend and discussed the details of her private areas, including manual explorations that young children needn’t ponder. This has obvious implications for those concerned about the sexualization of children. Inasmuch as a graphic novel is not word-for-word, such details could have been excluded. To my mind, however, the second layer is the clincher.
Not surprisingly, when the diary was first made public decades ago, somebody (probably Anne or her father, perhaps at her request) glued paper over these sections so they could not be seen. Little did that protector expect humanity would develop technology to see through the barrier without ruining the underlying text.
In other words, these pages were never meant to be seen, and it’s more than likely Anne would have been mortified to know not only that such secrets were available for the adult public of the world to know, but that school children might be encountering them… in school. Think of the prudent barriers through which we’re blasting, these days. Not only did the keepers of Anne’s legacy peak into the private parts of her diary never intended for other eyes, but they’ve published them for the world to see. Next, the graphic novel writer and publisher made the conscious decision to include these sections in a cartoonish text for children, and radicals insist that any parents who object to their use in public schools are censorious fascists.
My view is that this is more like an inversion of the truth. Those hoping to enlist Anne in their cultural and political battles are abusing and violating her for the purposes of propaganda, which has a terrifyingly familiar ring.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 on ChatGPT.
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As Americans on both sides of the political aisle highlight how poorly situated our federal government is in a time of international volatility (albeit for different reasons), we can’t look only at events of the past few months. We also can’t assume we know the full answer fully from our own perspectives, so this is just my brief summary.
Certainly, the seeds of the present fell into Western Civilization’s soil centuries ago, but tracing the many interweaving vines from those events isn’t directly helpful for any practical action. So, the broadest I’ll go is to blame a century and a half of progressives’ impatience with the gradual advancement of society coupled with conservatives’ inattentiveness to preventing them from undermining the core of our key institutions.
That jointly culpable broad trend culminated, after the outrageous treatment of President George W. Bush, in detrimental inflection points during the Obama presidency, which transformed what should have been a morally historic milestone — election of the first black President — into perhaps the pivot point at which the end of our country became inevitable. Many examples are available, but a few of the principal ones are:
- Obama’s general tone of Alinskyite division
- The government’s overreaches and subversion of precedent and due process for such innovations as Obamacare and the housing bubble bailouts
- The Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage as the culmination of a social campaign by cultural elites, especially inasmuch as it involved simply devaluing and ignoring contrary arguments, supported by…
- Progressives’ growing comfort with using psychological strategies to “nudge” masses of people toward “decisions” that the powerful people preferred (for everybody’s own good, naturally)
- The Obama administration’s shuffling of billions of dollars of borrowed federal money to radical activists and intellectuals by various projects, funding streams, and requirements
Not only did each of these factors have its own directly deleterious consequences, but together they set the stage for the backlash election of President Donald Trump, after which progressives and Democrats (if they aren’t precisely the same group) amplified their divisiveness and self-permission to ignore established process and civic etiquette, and even (I’d say) to undermine our democratic standards in order to cheat.
That state of affairs — which could be the result of natural forces and human nature or a to-some-degree deliberate campaign by communist revolutionaries — has brought us to what might be the end stages of collapse or, at least, a civil war.
Featured image created by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 on ChatGPT.
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I ask because that looks pretty clearly to be what happens in the video attached to this tweet:
Given some online interactions, I’m not even sure Democrat partisans are psychologically capable of seeing the kick — as if it’s one of those optical illusions that some people just don’t process. I suppose the best-case scenario (if I suffer from an opposite shortcoming) is that the frail White House occupant tripped on the dog like he recently tripped on a stage, but that’s a problem in its own right.
Of most fundamental concern, however, is the need for a single standard. We all know how this video would be treated were Biden a Republican. In that way, this minor matter is too perfectly representative of so much about Biden’s time in office. Powerful forces are set on ensuring he is propped up and his disasters are spun to be positives. If this video does catch some attention, expect Democrats to crow about how agile he must be to kick a big dog like that.
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For reasons of prudence and compassion, we should be reluctant to judge the parenting decisions of others. Most often, we don’t know the individuals or their challenges well enough to interject our views. On the other side of the ledger, however, radicals leverage this interpersonal etiquette to establish detrimental norms — to which others’ response is verboten — that serve their political ends. And so, to an extent, we’re obligated to respond when public figures make public statements about their parenting decisions when they can’t help but affect cultural norms.
Here’s local media personality and meteorologist Kelly Bates allowing her family matters to become a politicized part of her conversation with Lauren Clem of Rhode Island Monthly magazine:
You mentioned earlier that your daughter, Winter, came out as transgender in 2021. What has it been like supporting and mentoring her knowing that she’ll face unique challenges as a trans woman?
It’s tough. But I was well prepared from my father. My father always instilled, ‘Family is everything.’ The mindset that if anyone in your family needs you, you’re there. It doesn’t matter, you drop everything and you run. His family that he grew up with was the same way. It’s all about family. So I was prepared. She came out — ‘Yes, absolutely, no problem. Whatever your needs are, they will be met, 100 percent.’ And that’s my dad. Winter initially came out as gay in high school and then went to college on Prince Edward Island for the first two years through the Berklee extension program, and it was during the second year that she was up there that I got a text one day that said, ‘Um, I’m a girl.’ And I said, ‘I always wanted a daughter,’ which is true. And off we went.
For the sake of clarity, we must clarify (insofar as clarity is even possible, these days) that the person Bates calls her “daughter” is a biological male who was previously her “son.” And I clarify further that I offer this in the spirit of a hopefully helpful participant in the public discussion among parents about the best approaches to raising healthy, well-adjusted children in a maniacal era.
To be blunt, I cannot think of a worse response to a son who announces that he is a girl than, “I always wanted a daughter.” As a moody and creative adolescent, I had my bouts of suicidal ideation, and it seems to me (having struggled my way through that morass) that a parent’s telling a confused son that she always wanted a daughter is tantamount to a parent’s telling a suicidal teen that, truth be told, a childless household, or a home with one with fewer children, had always been the preference. In the latter case, the parent would confirm to the child that he or she never should have been born, and in the former, that the parent never really accepted or desired the child as he or she was.
I sincerely hope for the most-life-affirming outcome possible for the Bates family. In the specific case of this interview, I hope (almost suspect) that Kelly’s statements are a sort of performative progressivism that isn’t truly representative of the situation. But for anybody facing similar questions, I find it my moral responsibility to suggest that she got it wrong. Some parents will hope (and, yes, pray) for a reversal of declarations such as her child’s, but in any event, disclaiming the identity that a child had professed up until that tentative “um” reversal is utterly irresponsible. Parents should want sons as much as they should want daughters. What they should want, at the core of it all, is the children whom they have.
I don’t doubt for a moment Kelly Bates would agree with this imperative, stated as such, but I fear, in the delusional hysteria of the trans movement, the affirmation of whims has overwhelmed true acceptance, which, as a parent, must incorporate guidance toward accepting reality. Indeed, fundamental to parenting inchoate humans is the establishment of the principle that reality exists, which is the polar opposite to confessing that one has always wished the reality of the child had been different.
Featured image created by Justin Katz, processing the text of “Antigonish” by Hughes Mearns through DALL-E.
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Visit the page for this video on the Ocean State Current.
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