On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s convenient COVID
- WPRI’s latest political poll
- The governor’s race
- When the people can’t get their way with a soccer stadium
- The privilege of progressive “Doctor” Munoz
Featured image by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The not-so-ground-breaking soccer stadium
- The implications of the Mar-a-Lago raid
- Checking in on the race for governor
- Diossa’s world tour
- The unspokens of Block Island Ferry violence
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Maybe my brain is excessively wired to see connections and patterns, but the raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and the Biden administration’s efforts to bully Catholic schools into promoting radical sexual ideology seem very much connected.
Rod Dreher gets us most of the way there, in an essay titled “Trump & Our Late Roman Moment” (emphasis in original):
This is a polity, not a graduate seminar in Kantian ethics. He’s right, you know. Y’all know that I am not a Trump fan, but in this case, I can’t separate the raid on his house from the rest of the rottenness of our ruling class. I am reminded of something I’ve repeated in this space a lot since I heard it last summer in Budapest. I was talking in a taxi with a younger voter who told me she planned to vote for Viktor Orban’s party in the spring election. I asked her why, and she spoke at length about how fed up she was with what she believed was Orban’s tolerance for financial corruption among his supporters. So why do you stick with Orban? I asked. She talked about culture — specifically, about gender ideology that the European Union was trying to push onto Hungarians, but which Orban was fighting tooth and nail. She put it something like this (I paraphrase): “All corruption is bad, but not all corruption is equally bad. Financial corruption is normal. The moral evil of gender ideology is on a totally different level. If we accept that spiritual and moral corruption, we are finished.”
For radicals, the moral evil (and the power that they think will accrue to them when it has spread sufficiently) is the point. Trump and his supporters are particularly loathsome to them not because they represent some sort of new norm-breaking trend (on any issue, one can find examples that radicals don’t care about norms). Rather they are a strong (if perhaps too late) assertion of the public against the radicals. They must, therefore, be proclaimed beyond the bounds of our public square.
Of course, that is another false boundary. Progressives don’t believe in a public square in the sense of a neutral ground on which we can debate and interact to the greatest extent possible. To them, there is only total victory. The public square is where they gather to tell everybody else how they must live. Like a religious cult, their imperative is to advance their ideology by any means available. When they’re out of power, they’re happy to leverage Western pluralism to keep society from stamping them out, but once they’re in power, they put on their own stamping shoes.
And so, progressives actively pursue policies that will directly hurt disadvantaged (often minority) children, because their cult is more important to them:
Catholic school leaders need to be aware that their schools could be cut off from the federal government’s free and subsidized lunch program if their policies don’t comply with the Biden administration’s revised rules against LGBTQ discrimination, experts warn.
Earlier this year the administration re-interpreted Title IX’s federal ban on sex discrimination to include “sexual orientation or gender identity.” Religious freedom and free speech advocates warn that the proposed rule change could be used to enforce mandates on hiring, bathrooms, using preferred pronouns, and dress codes.
The broadened definition now also applies to the National School Lunch Program, a federally funded meal assistance program administered by the Department of Agriculture that provides subsidized or free lunches to more than 30 million public and private school students from low-income households.
According to the article, the courts are already involved and beginning to affirm that our religious freedom still exists. Even if our totalitarian administration fails to get its way in this case, the attempt reinforces an important point directly in line with the norm-breaking raid of Mar-a-Lago: That power, to progressives, means telling other people to whom they must kneel.
For myself, I still believe in pluralism, which means the best defense is the only defense: being clear about reality, including the radicals’ machinations, and being strong in our principles, including a willingness to self-sacrifice.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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The economic news is peculiar, lately. Inflation is high, and the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is shrinking. Yet, government data shows a strong increase in payroll jobs in the most-recent month. It’s difficult to know which side of that “yet” the following news supports, or whether it helps explain how all of the above can be true at the same time:
On Thursday, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline dropped eight cents to $4.13.
New data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that gas demand dropped from 9.25 million barrels per day to 8.54 million per day last week.
That’s 1.24 million barrels per day lower than last year and “in line with demand at the end of July 2020,” when there were widespread virus-related restrictions and fewer people were hitting the road, according to AAA.
Of course, we should acknowledge that this is how basic economics is supposed to work. The Biden Administration drove the price of gasoline through the roof, and high prices are supposed to reduce demand.
One common story Americans have heard lately is that employers can’t find people to fill the jobs they have, so part of the mystery is how people have been surviving. Perhaps the strong jobs numbers are an indication that gas prices and inflation finally pushed people past the point at which they could maintain a tolerable lifestyle while not working. So, they’re finally taking jobs while also driving less.
A deeper dive into the numbers reinforces this interpretation. Total employment increased 398,000 from May to June and then 528,000 from June to July. Although I’m not sure how these different datapoints line up on a week-to-week basis, these numbers are in keeping with related data about job openings, hires, and separations (quits and fires). June’s 6,374,000 hires was the lowest of the year so far, but separations were also the lowest of the year, at 5,931,000. Notice that the gap between these two (i.e., the implied increase in employment) is 443,000.
A fuller, less-optimistic, picture emerges when we consider that the total number of job openings decreased by much more, falling from 11,303,000 in May to 10,698,000 in June, a drop of 605,000. That’s 162,000 job openings that employers apparently decided not to fill.
In the bizarre post-COVID welfare state wherein people were somehow deciding not to work, the job market had plenty of space to absorb workers without having to create any new jobs. Superficial economics reporters are touting the fact that the unemployment rate is now matched its level in September 2019, pre-COVID, but during that month, there were only 7,100,000 job openings.
I write “only,” but that appears to be on the high end of normal, going back to the year 2000, which brings us back to the point at which we started: This economy is abnormal.
Featured image by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.
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As long as I’ve been paying attention to politics in Rhode Island, mainstream Republicans have given the impression that they are ashamed of their affiliation — that they just found the ruling Democrats to be so off-base and corrupt that they needed a different option, and the GOP was the only viable one. This isn’t a winning attitude, and it’s only been amplified as its losing streak has compounded.
If your brand is “somewhere else that you can go,” your constituency will be limited to people who are so fed up with their first choice that they can’t take it anymore. For people who grew up indoctrinated to believe that the Democrat Party is for “the little guy” and must be supported as a matter of good will and tradition, “can’t take it anymore” is an extremely high threshold. Sure, “the good guys” may have their problems, but they’re trying, and their hearts are in the right place.
Naturally, the Democrats, including their mainstream-media wing, have reinforced their defenses by painting their opposition as unacceptable, as evidenced by the fact that even its supporters have to hide their affiliation. In the past week, we’ve had an excellent example of this strategy in action.
The single best case for Allan Fung’s Republican campaign to represent Rhode Island in Congress is that the GOP is almost certain to reclaim control of the House in November. Having Democrat-only representation in the House and Senate does not serve Rhode Island well when control is apt to change hands as regularly as it has been.
So, when Speaker-of-the-House-in-Waiting Kevin McCarthy arrives in Rhode Island to tout Fung’s campaign, that reinforces Fung’s best case. Yet, mainstream Democrat-journalists like Edward Fitzpatrick of the Boston Globe presented the visit as a liability, giving over around three-quarters of their coverage to Democrats to spin about how much of a risk the visit is to Fung.
Worse, the Fung campaign facilitated this treatment by being conspicuously silent, as represented to perfection with the Globe’s updated headline, now that Fung has offered a statement: “Fung breaks his silence about Kevin McCarthy’s visit to R.I.” Politicians don’t “break their silence” when they’re proud or enthusiastic about something.
The hook for the media was McCarthy tweeting a picture of his visit, as shown in the featured image of this post. McCarthy has been touting Fung nationally because his viability as a candidate shows how far into blue territory the red wave may go, this autumn. That excitement should be fostered in Rhode Island, too.
Rhode Island Republicans should harness that excitement to inspire their voters to go out and, while going about their lives, make the case for their beliefs and normalize their party.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The Fung camp lets the media and Democrats turn his best argument into a liability
- Matos hides from debate
- McKee hides from access to public records requests
- The mysteries of the CD1 Democrat primary
- Nellie targets the right audience with the wrong style
- The General Treasurer candidates fight for approval from RI’s aristocracy (government unions)
Featured image by Lena DeFanti on Unsplash.
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An underappreciated risk laps at the legs of our advanced knowledge. When people didn’t know why things were happening in the world around them or how to predict change, they just dealt with them. They invested some energy in a relationship with gods in the hope of exerting some control on their environments, but mostly, they adapted. The gods would not respond predictably, forcing people to plan for their rituals’ unlikelihood of success. So, they moved around; they changed their habits.
When people think they know why things are happening and how to predict change, they fall into the delusion that they can take action that will be more effective than those old rituals. Surely, if we can predict tides to the inch one-hundred years out (which we can’t, but put that aside), we can do something to affect outcomes we don’t like. This combination of having something (and, often, someone) to blame for undesirable outcomes and feeling that there may be something concrete and scientific reduces the sense that adaptation should be the strategy.
So, we keep getting articles like this from journalists such as the Providence Journal’s Alex Kuffner:
Last October, when seawater encroached on power lines at a substation in Warren, Rhode Island, the skies were blue.
There wasn’t a nor’easter. No hurricane sending its wrath north. It was a typical autumn day — with a king tide.
New Englanders often associate flooding with storms, and rightfully so. But imagine sunny days with impassable roads, bubbling storm drains and basements-turned-swimming pools? Those scenarios will become much more common, like during a full moon or change in prevailing winds or currents, according to a report released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
We need to learn to read with a skeptical eye. First, king tides are not climate change; we live on a giant, moving, and irregularly shaped ball covered in water, which produces irregularities. Second, the future-casting of problems requires more substantiation than, say, a graph of actual changes. Third, when a journalist breaks the fourth wall to ask the reader to “imagine” some future circumstance, the article is an exercise, not in reporting, but in advocacy.
A little skepticism would also help us address concrete, solvable problems, considering all of the relevant factors. For instance:
There [are] also high numbers of low-income people of color who live along the waterfront.
“The only grocery store in East Boston, at a really big tide, salt water will touch the back of the supermarket, putting people’s food security at risk,” Wormser said. The New England Produce Center in Chelsea, one of the largest in the world, floods during high tides and storms.
You know what else puts people’s food security at risk? Economic downturns and an inability to produce and ship food. Those human activities are representative of the ways in which we survive and adapt, and over thousands of years, they’ve proven much more reliable than efforts to stop natural change.
Featured image via Shutterstock.
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As local media sources have started to track instances of monkeypox in our area, I’ve wondered how many Rhode Islanders know that it is mostly (although not entirely) a venereal disease spreading mostly among gay men. Except, as Rod Dreher points out, that’s not a fact to which we’re permitted to react:
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, writes in the NYT that monkeypox is about to become another huge public health failure. His reasons for that grim conclusion are sound, but not once does he mention that the authorities could easily and effectively respond in part by shutting down gay sex clubs. Gay men cannot fail; they can only be failed by public agencies.
The contrast with our still-recent experience with COVID is striking. Dreher makes it concrete in the person of Luisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who oversaw a tremendous shutdown of economic activity for COVID but won’t impose limits on the Southern Decadence Festival in light of monkeypox.
Of course, the two epidemics may be pointing to the same problem. A major reason the COVID response was so invasive is that we didn’t allow ourselves to distinguish between groups of people whose demographics put them in different risk categories. Either we all must suffer or no precautions may be taken.
This imperative may backfire on progressives in the long run. After all, if we’re all going to be restricted and freed without distinction, the boundary for acceptable behavior for everybody will constrict.
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When discussing public policy, responsible politicians, journalists, and members of the public should never separate the issues of energy and the environment. They are a single, nuanced, and extremely complicated issue. Absent this imperative, Democrat Governor Dan McKee feels free to brag about his environmental policy thus …
“Over last 16 months my administration has made historic investments and progress to address climate change,” McKee said, citing a bill he signed requiring 100% renewable electricity offsets by 2033 and a procurement for 1,000 kilowatts of offshore wind power. “There hasn’t been a more aggressive governor in the history of the state of Rhode Island, in terms of actually putting forward plans and activating resources.”
… while playing the populist when it comes to energy policy thus:
McKee on Monday filed public comment with the PUC asking them to suspend the customer charge on electric bills until next summer and suggested spreading the rate hike over 12 months.
The governor also asked the commission to give out the $32.5 million in electric ratepayer bill credits that were part of the state’s settlement with Rhode Island Energy’s parent company PPL.
“An increase of this magnitude has a potentially devastating impact on residential ratepayers, particularly our most vulnerable populations, including low-income, the elderly and seriously ill individuals,” McKee said Monday.
It would be very easy, indeed, to overstate the influence of Rhode Island politicians, and this governor in particular, on energy prices, just as it is very easy, indeed, to overstate their ability to affect the environment, but the two are undeniably linked. To the extent Rhode Island policy has an effect on the environment, it also has an effect on energy prices, and the cost increases we’re facing are a direct consequence of such policies on national and international levels, which begin with environmentalist ideology.
Unfortunately, few influencers of public debate in our state want people to understand the intricacies of cause and effect in this area. The guiding strategy is to vilify energy providers so as to force society to bend to environmentalists’ ideological demands, which are born of self-interest and fear, and then to vilify energy providers again in order to demagog against the consequences of the very same demands.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The cost of a soccer stadium
- The cost of union endorsements for the governor
- The cost of a mayor’s endorsement
- The value of the GOP Speaker-to-Be’s visit
- The coin toss between McKee and the Projo
Featured image from Daniel McKee campaign ad.
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