The most essential insight of George Orwell’s 1984 is that it isn’t enough for totalitarians to dominate. They must demand subjugated people acknowledge them as the arbiters of reality itself. This quality is the telltale warning about a movement’s nature, and spotting its bizarre appearance in the United States, I’m beginning to wonder whether our constitutional safeguards against totalitarianism forced it to take a contorted shape.
That shape is clearly visible in the what-reality-are-we-in controversy over the L.A. Dodgers’ disinvitation of “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” from the baseball team’s “Pride Night” event. What the group is about is entirely obvious, but our society is in such a near-totalitarian state of confusion a veil of mainstream narrative is draped across the radical face of reality. With that veil in place, the Dodgers failed to anticipate that the invitation — and giving the group a “Community Hero Award” — would generate a negative response.
Manipulators like CBS News provide no images of the “sisters” and leave a giant question mark about why anybody would be offended by the group. One must turn to the New York Post for details like this:
The “nuns” — who have names like Sister T’aint A Virgin, Sister Porn Again and Sister Holly Lewya — were being awarded for supposedly “promoting human rights and respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”
The “sisters” (mostly men dressed up in a mocking imitation of women) claims to be a charitable organization, but what is their charity?
We use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.
And whom do they attack with their “irreverent wit”? Christians, naturally, more specifically Catholics, and more specifically nuns. Their “charity” is to offend people with whose beliefs they disagree. They choose the most holy days to mock Christians, and their costumes are obviously malicious. Mockery and hatred are their reasons for being — their identity. This is unambiguous, and to accept such activity as charitable is to adopt their bigotry.
The context was different decades ago, when the culture had a Christian consensus. Irreverence became a mainstay of comedy and counterculture as a way to take a breather from reality and gain some distance by which to test assumptions. When the counterculture becomes the driving force of the mainstream, however, the mockery takes on a wholly different character.
In an essay for National Review, the father of a teacher and student who survived the Covenant School shooting makes a telling observation. Waiting for two hours to be reunited with his family after the attack, Graham Hillard watched the therapeutic state swoop in:
During that mind-focusing span, I acquired a series of insights that had previously been merely secondhand or theoretical. I learned that the ideology of psychotherapy has become so culturally ingrained that assembled parents were urged to “process” the day’s events even as those events remained ongoing. (In an irony worthy of Voltaire, the city-employed counselors stalking the aisles wore rainbow-flag lanyards.)
The tried-and-true test of the inverted counterfactual is instructive. What if a murderous Christian zealot targeted an institution focused on gay families and the government therapists showed up wearing crosses?
To be sure, the city workers could not have known the shooter’s motives at the time (which motives, Hillard notes, authorities appear to be minimizing even now by withholding her “manifesto”), but we cannot be confident it would have mattered. After all, they knew they were going to a Christian school and apparently didn’t reconsider their ideologically charged lanyards.
A culture in which maliciously mocking Catholic nuns is a form of charity begets a society in which Christians should be grateful for whatever comforts government is still compelled to offer them and a school shooting is a fine time for sartorial evangelism. The totalitarians will grin as they insist it’s a matter of civil rights to force people to pay the bill when others wish to kill their own children, and the inexorable logic of evil will demand ever-more-visible declarations that two plus two equals five.
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A funny thing happens when the warnings and predictions of non-progressives begin to prove true: the progressive activists who call themselves “journalists” and carefully curate the news for the rest of us find other things to talk about. Twitter, now that it is increasingly deprogramming its formerly brainwashed algorithm, is full of stories that would utterly change the way Americans think about what’s going on in the world if they were reported without the left-wing spin.
Starting local, we’ve got Barrington teachers’ winning their lawsuit after having been fired for declining to receive the COVID vaccine. Whether vaccines were desirable at the time is a distinct question, but the law-breaking mania that led progressives in government to think they could do whatever they wanted to battle the virus was clearly a mistake.
That same mania led to changes in election procedures — coincidentally right before a presidential election that progressive Democrats were promoting as a fight to save the universe. (Yeah, no motive for fraud there!) By themselves, those last-minute changes arguably made the results illegitimate, and yet, the datapoints that things weren’t quite right in the execution of the election flowed all the way down to good, old-fashioned fraud. Tucker Carlson reported (while still on Fox News) on double-counting in a county in Georgia, for instance. Obviously, this isn’t a recent story, but it feels like it is because it never received the coverage it should have. Carlson’s question at the end has only become more relevant:
All of the ballots, the whistleblower tells us, had been filled out by a printer. Not by hand. And many of them supported the exact same candidates, democrats, including Joe Biden… Why are we okay with any of this? We’re okay with it because we’ve been told we have to be okay with it. We’re undermining democracy if we ask questions about what happened during the 2020 election, and of course, that’s a perfect inversion of the truth.
Switching from “inversion” to “invasion,” Ted Cruz takes down a reporter who’s parroting Democrat talking points on immigration, with the conclusion that the chaos at our border is happening because the Biden administration and the Democrat Party wanted it to happen. This is a policy decision. It’s messy now and can’t help but flash through the veil a little, but the media will attempt to paper it over, and then when the consequences emerge, they’ll promote other causes to explain them. Those “causes” will almost certainly involve accusations of racism and blaming Americans for being bad people.
Refocusing local, albeit in another state, we see how the spin works with a national story about a school board in Colorado. Here’s the tweet text from NBC News:
Conservatives took over a Colorado school board, and then:
• Adopted a right-wing group’s social studies program
• Did not reapply for grants to pay counselors
• 40% of the high school’s professional staff won’t return next year
A slight step toward objectivity would raise many questions. Why did the local voters elect these people? Was the earlier social studies program “left-wing”? Were the grants for counselors leading to a benefit residents wanted, or was it allowing outside interests to manipulate children? What roles , and how many, are the “professional staff,” and is it good, bad, or indifferent that these particular people are leaving? Obviously, residents wanted change, but when NBC News is expressing it wish it wants to fulfill when it reports “growing opposition.” That’s how activist journalists manipulate people.
And then there’s the one-two punch of the Biden crime family receiving millions from China and not-really-surprising revelations about the Russia-collusion hoax perpetrated by Democrats and the country’s intelligence apparatus.
I’m not claiming that I can see perfectly through the fog, because more than one machine is generating it. But one possible reality is that we currently have a president whose family has received a fortune in payments from a geopolitical adversary, who was put into office through a multifaceted coup, and who has deliberately instigated an invasion to change the population for political benefit, after having leveraged a pandemic to undermine our constitutional order and take control of the government, with the help of high- and low-level fraud, while activists and the mainstream media press relentlessly for a radical social revolution and work to undermine democratic opposition.
That long sentence sounds extreme, but it’s entirely plausible, and here’s the important part: the craziness of reality will only worsen to the point of mass suffering and death if we lack the information and wherewithal to push back and enforce accountability.
Featured image by Tengyart on Unsplash.
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In recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, Canadian writer-explorer Wade Davis took a slight detour to speak of the community benefits of Canada’s socialized healthcare system:
It has everything to do with social solidarity. It has everything to do with every Canadian knowing that they belong, and knowing that if their kid gets sick, they will get exactly, and I tell you, it is exactly, the same care as any other Canadian, including the Prime Minister. Yes, I sometimes have to wait for medical service in Canada, but everyone does, but no one is left behind. And that is one of the reasons that we have a less highly charged society, why we seem to get along better.
At the same time, Rod Dreher observes this of Canadian healthcare:
… the state and the medical profession are rapidly creating a culture in Canada in which people who cannot care for themselves will be pushed to commit suicide so as not to be a burden on others — in part because the healthy and the financially well off will have been conditioned to think that they have no obligation out of sheer human decency to help those who are suffering. Remember, the concept of “soft totalitarianism” that I talk about in Live Not By Lies is a totalitarianism that takes root because of a population’s unwillingness to suffer pain and anxiety. We see in Canada that the state and other institutions captured by progressive ideology are teaching Canadians to internalize an ideology that tells them that some lives are unworthy of life, and should be ended “beautifully” by the system.
For our purpose, here, let’s not focus on the practical reality of whether Davis’s testimony is correct and, instead, focus on the socialist belief, whether true or not. A shared government system, the thinking goes, provides “equitable” care to all. Sure, the privileged must sacrifice on behalf of this levelling, but they are rewarded with life in a friendlier, more-communal society.
Yet, people remain human and self-interested. If you feel that you’ve been tolerating a lower degree of service for the benefit of others, you may resent those who waste your shared resources to prolong, as Dreher puts it, a “life unworthy of life.”
Notably, Dreher takes that phrase from a Nazi principle, which dovetails with his characterization of euthanasia as evidence of “the re-paganization of a once-Christian civilization.” He points out that, in ancient Rome, early Christians would rescue unwanted babies whose parents had left them outside to die of exposure. Indeed, perhaps the most significant practical (as distinct from theological) attribute of Christianity, producing all that followed, was the idea that every person matters as a being in relationship with God.
These days, unwanted children are aborted, rather than left to die. While that may be more humane, in a sense, it also comes with the assumption that their lives are not worthy of life because their parents do not wish to care for them. The poor, disabled, and merely unhappy are now receiving the message that the caretaker collective has reached the same conclusion.
When government is tasked with maintaining social solidarity and possesses the means to kill nicely, citizens may feel as if their community is more tightly knit, but with a sharper edge. Move beyond that people aren’t “left behind,” but their encouraged to suppress the highly charged desire for life and drop out of life with a smile.
Featured image by Francisco Goya on WikiArt.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee adopts all of RI’s homeless (on the way to socialized housing)
- Barrington teachers get COVID-excess accountability (well, it’s a start)
- How and why the media ignores the most important story in RI education
- Pandering to radicals for a non-existent gun problem in Rhode Island
- Voter fraud and the story the RIGOP needs to tell
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Stephen Skoly considers a run for CD1, Neil deMause talks publicly backed stadiums, Joseph Allen on AI, Mike Davis talks about Senator Whitehouse and the Supreme Court, and Mike Stenhouse of the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Announcing the move of his cable news show to Twitter, Tucker Carlson suggests that most of what mainstream journalists report is factually true, but their stories are chosen and constructed so as to paint a completely false image of reality. Take Rhode Island education as an example.
As long as I’ve been following the story, government-run education in Rhode Island has been expensive and ineffective relative to other states (let alone to private options and the world). Just a few years ago, a team from Johns Hopkins University conducted a review of education in Providence, and the Wall Street Journal characterized its findings as “An Education Horror Show.” As a result, the state took over the schools, but without any signs of improvement. Why?
Because the teacher unions dug in, and Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green (then newly appointed) attempted to work with them. Whether you agree with me that her decision (urged by the politically ambitious Democrat governor, Gina Raimondo, no doubt) was a cataclysmic mistake or see it as a necessity, even if challenging, you simply must acknowledge that the unions are central to the story of Rhode Island education.
And yet, a single four-month-old story in GoLocalProv is the only instance I can find covering John Lancellotta’s lawsuit against the West Warwick school department alleging that he was let go because he exercised his constitutionally guaranteed right not to pay dues to a teacher union. Why?
Because for a variety of reasons journalists don’t want to help spread the information that teachers don’t have to join their local unions. A few of them came of age at a time when unions were considered heroic, and they can’t shake that narrative, so Lancellotta falls immediately into the character of suspicious troublemaker. The younger journalists have recently emerged from a K-BA system that is more about indoctrination than education. Others are fully onboard with the progressive movement of which government unions are a driving organizational force. Some are probably (consciously or otherwise) wary of landing on the disfavored list of the most powerful people in the Ocean State.
As a purely economic decision, remaining in a teacher union makes no sense for any individual teacher, yet it’s extremely rare for teachers not to opt in. This results from a multilayered campaign to prop up union membership. The broadest layer is of inculcated ignorance, whereby teachers simply don’t know their rights. Colleges of education certainly won’t explain their options to students, and journalists help to keep teachers from having reason to investigate for themselves.
As the layers become more focused, they involve deception about what being in or out of the union entails. Another layer lays deliberate obstacles to being non-union (e.g., the district office simply begins deducting dues, and the superintendent tells the teacher she has to discuss the matter with the district’s union leader, who imposes improper obstacles). The most pointed layer includes experiences such as Lancellotta’s, which send warning messages to any teachers who still come to the conclusion that avoiding the union is the right decision for them.
Whatever individuals’ conclusions might be, a fully informed citizenry would be familiar with this reality and understand its connection to school failure in Providence and elsewhere. Unfortunately, as Carlson explains, a well funded and influential industry is dedicated to ensuring that the public is not familiar with any reality but the one ideologues want to be true.
Featured image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash.
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Clearing out some old links reminded me that Rhode Island’s “pay equity” statute goes into effect this year, as Jack Kelly wrote in Forbes in late 2021. While generally supportive of the legislation, Kelly did acknowledge the potential for “unintended consequences”:
According to Joshua Nadreau, a partner in the Boston office of the labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips, Rhode Island’s statute is “one of the few pay equity laws that targets protected classifications other than sex or gender.”
Nadreau posits, “This may add considerable burdens to employers who may not have historically tracked this demographic information. How many employers track the religion or sexual orientation of their employees? One of the questions I have is whether an employer will be held legally responsible for a pay disparity between various protected classes if it doesn’t even possess the information to make that determination in the first place.”
More insidiously, “merit” is a tricky thing. It’s not always easy to articulate why an employee is a “rock star,” and managers can easily disagree. A key component of judgment for a manager is whether an employee is a personality match for that manager, and such subjective factors will now leave employers vulnerable to lawsuits. Stack these requirements onto the side of the scale in favor of employers’ not expanding or staying in Rhode Island. This sort of legislation makes employees more costly while doing nothing to make them more valuable.
Dragging down the economy isn’t the only reason to be wary of policies that seek to “correct” social outcomes. I recently had cause to run a pay-related regression analysis that had sex as one of the variables. The analysis did find that women make less when starting a new job, all else equal, although the “all else” was missing some very important variables (like industry). However, that’s the subject of a continual back-and-forth. The overlooked consideration that piqued my interest was that the gap is much less significant for younger women than for older ones.
Add in the fact that younger women are more likely still to be pursuing education while their male peers are more likely to start working full time sooner (often in jobs with lower ceilings), and it’s entirely possible that young women actually have an edge. In 20-40 years, we could see a complete reversal and worsening of the pay gap.
I’d need to do more research before insisting that’s the case, but the point is that it’s not even a matter of discussion. The unintended consequences, in other words, could be massive, devastating, and long-standing when a moral panic produces reckless social experimentation by a cultural elite with little ability or appetite to think a contentious topic through completely.
Featured image by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Duplicate votes: rare and easily caught or the tip of the iceberg?
- McKee extends the “emergency.”
- Why doesn’t anybody qualified want to run for Congress?
- Ray McKay’s entry for Senate.
- Bud Light steps into the quiet rage.
- McKee’s binding to Biden.
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The high price of detecting voter fraud.
- Neronha and McKee’s strong relationship of occasional “hellos.”
- AG’s Twitter serving as his platform for backlash.
- Cranston St. Armory’s plan to evacuate warming shelter and relocate families.
- Raimondo and government inevitably sneaky industrial policies.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
Guests: Dora Vasquez Hellner, Army veteran
Alyson Matera, Rhode Island National Guard
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo
Description: Our guests represent a broad range of years of service and experience. Dora Vasquez Hellner is retired with 23 years of military experience. Alyson Matera is active and has 8 years of service to her credit. They share common experiences as well as distinct and different service. A brief history of women in the military is not only interesting but also remarkable. They also comment on the challenges women have faced over time and the alarming experience of sexual trauma some women have experienced in military serviced.
