I have to chuckle when I see a progressive like Steve Ahlquist pen an article with a headline like, “A corrupt process from the core, Rhode Island redistricting wraps up.”
I mean, a corrupt redistricting process is about as surprising as a hangover after a long night of drinking without water breaks, and progressives are all about that big government bender. Notice the number of words Steve spends faulting Republicans for not pushing back on Democrats enough, even as he’s silent about anything at all his progressive Democrat allies might have done.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Three things — and only three things — will limit corruption in government. One, reduce its power to the point that moral incentives have a chance against corrupt incentives. Two, tolerate a split political system in which the powerful know their opponents may soon wield the power they assert right now. And three, foster countervailing powers in society with their own incentives to keep government in check.
Progressives oppose all three, because their guiding light is a world in which they have the power to do everything as they believe it should be done. That is also why we can be sure they’d be just as corrupt (or worse) if they ever take control.
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COVID-19 can be a nasty disease, even when it’s not a killer, which it most definitely can be. The coronavirus is not, however, the only killer, and disease is not the only nasty thing that can happen to your life.
As we look out across the landscape of continuing fear, ramped up to an irrational level, and observe, aghast, the willingness of many of our neighbors to throw away our rights liberally in exchange for the promise that somebody else will take responsibility for our well-being, we should give due consideration to Eli Sherman’s article on WPRI, “2021 was one of the deadliest years on record in Rhode Island.”
If the news story has any practical utility, it can only be to assess the decisions of those who claimed such extraordinary power when the pandemic arrived in our state and, thereby, to foster accountability and readjustment. Yet, the question of whether the response was justified or well managed is not even asked. The implied answer is, “of course!”
Wherever that angle might come up, Sherman gives the government’s public health architects the floor:
“While preliminary data suggest that our overall fatalities for 2021 were lower than our total for 2020, COVID-19 still tragically took the lives of more than 1,000 Rhode Islanders last year,” interim health director Dr. James McDonald told Target 12.
That statement simply isn’t true. If we wish to be generous, perhaps we could say only that it is not precise, but the 1,157 deaths that the state puts on the board for COVID were people who died with the disease, not from it. We do not know what the overlap truly is, and we will never know how much this loose definition covered up deaths that would best be attributed to the government’s response to the disease.
WPRI leads with a chart that shows nothing in history like 2020’s 1,542-death spike in Rhode Island since the 2,897-death spike resulting from the 1918 flu — before we had even penicillin to fight diseases. Tracing that line, readers might reasonably wonder whether the lockdowns had any justification at all, given that the Spanish Flu was so much more deadly than the Chinese Communist Flu.
The answer is not open-and-shut in either direction. Supporters of the regime might next turn to Sherman’s chart of historical death rates, which show the COVID spike in a much less dramatic light. This takes into account, most notably, the larger population, and here lockdown advocates might insist we can see the benefit of their policy. Fair enough; but this picture doesn’t justify Sherman’s scary headline about “the deadliest years on record.” He tries to have it both ways.
Those of us who argue that the lockdowns were too destructive might also notice that Sherman is incorrect to assert that “the death toll from drug overdoses… has grown each year since 2018.” His own chart shows that overdoses were down in 2019, as part of a downward trend every year since 2016. The year of the COVID lockdowns, 2020, brought a 25% leap, with an additional 76 deaths.
Tragically, 2021 brought another increase, albeit a smaller one. So, if we return to Sherman’s scary headline, the context is quite different. Comparing 2021 to 2019, we see an increase of 835 deaths from all causes. Eighty-eight of those (11%) were from overdoses. If suicides followed a similar trend, they’d account for another 4% of the overall increase. Homicides were also up about 20% in 2020 (although that trend began the year before, perhaps for policy reasons). Now factor in deaths because people skipped hospital visits, were more sedentary, were more anxious, and so on, and the idea that the response to COVID played a significant role becomes plausible, indeed.
For the sake of our rights and our health, these are topics that require thorough public scrutiny. Unfortunately, the news media seems disinclined to help in that effort.
Featured image by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash.
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Judy Schwalbach makes that connection explicit in a report on school choice policies and history in Washington, D.C.:
During the 20th century, federally sanctioned housing “redlining” influenced the composition of neighborhoods in large cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. The term “redlining” came from the color-coded maps developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) (on which mortgage lending under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was partly based). The HOLC limited access to federally backed mortgages for home loans in the red-colored and lowest-grade neighborhoods described as “hazardous.”
Although Congress outlawed discriminatory lending policies in the mid-20th century, prior government practices had created geographic concentrations of lower-income families. Coupled with residential assignment of schooling, which is largely maintained by school districts today, many schools remain racially and economically segregated. Unlike many other metropolitan cities throughout the United States, however, Washington, D.C., has effectively overcome the barriers imposed by geographic school boundaries through open enrollment, a robust charter school sector, and a private school scholarship program. States should follow this lead, and, at the same time, take steps to prohibit school districts from drawing attendance zone boundaries within their borders.
When one hears about the history of redlining policies, lately, it’s usually in the service of a “systemic racism” argument. Basically, overt racism in the past segregated black Americans and deprived them of the twentieth century’s opportunities for the collection of generationally accumulative wealth.
Well, one of the most profound consequences of that development can be found in where and with whom a community’s children are educated. Eliminating that barrier — that marker of segregation — ought to be a no-brainer for advocates who truly wish for the betterment of minority families. Whether they take the opportunity to seek out private schools or stay under the public-sector umbrella, the pathway out of failing schools, which they’ll walk with other children who will acculturate them to the practices and expectations of families that were not subjected to that historical racism, will broaden, even as it forces the schools they are leaving to improve and better demonstrate their value.
The advocates, themselves, may not have thought through the reasons that their suite of policies have collected together, but in this case, strong candidates step forward as explanations. The Democrat Party is defined by its preference for a big-government, centralized-decision-making approach, which necessitates resistance to proposals that distribute resources and authority. Sharpening this bias in education, in particular, is the huge reliance on teachers unions for political donations and activism, which builds a defensive wall against accountability in public schools. Furthermore, long cultivation of identity politics and a grievance industry has made key figures at the intersection of minority communities and the Democrat Party completely reliant on continuing strife between the races.
Advocates who specifically focus on housing have even more reason to break from these partisan chains. After all, if a house in a low-income neighborhood nonetheless provides access to high-quality schools anywhere in the state, in or out of the government school system, its value will increase. Thus, even as the children’s prospect for earning generational wealth increase, their parents’ property will grow in value — probably more rapidly than the market overall, because beginning from a suppressed baseline.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Don’t get me wrong. RI House Minority Leader Blake Filippi is right to be pursuing his lawsuit against the Joint Committee of Legislative Services, which is undoubtedly a central hub of our legislature’s corruption. But the judiciary isn’t where these disputes should have to be resolved. Think about it:
Filippi, the top Republican in the R.I. House of Representatives, filed an initial complaint against his fellow legislative leaders nearly two years ago, alleging he’d been unlawfully excluded from meetings of the powerful Joint Committee of Legislative Services.
Two years. Think how thoroughly that sort of timeline stacks the deck in favor of corruption.
The problem is that our political system is pretty thoroughly locked up for the benefit of a single party, so our political system cannot foster accountability. If power could conceivably change hands from election to election, those controlling the JCLS, one, wouldn’t be as comfortable creating such a powerful entity, because it could be handed over to their opponents in the next election, and two, would be compelled to back off when this sort of controversy arose, because they’d be afraid that not doing so would have political consequences.
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I suspect they’re wildly overrepresented in the items that Twitter pushes onto my screen, but Rhode Island progressives are really something to behold in their reaction to Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s belated and overly hesitant removal of statewide mask mandates.
As I suggested earlier, for many of the recognizable personalities, their rhetoric is probably wholly political and ideological. They’ve got a primary to win, so whenever possible, they have to paint everything the more-moderate incumbent does as wildly wrong and dangerous. (To younger generations, this style of politics is relatively new, largely amplified by social media, and it’s making it impossible for anybody actually to govern reasonably.)
Still, they’d get no traction and back off if they didn’t think their primary voters were susceptible to their fear mongering.
Turn now to a series of tweets in which conservative Canadian media figure Ezra Levant predicts how “this trucker rebellion is going to end.” I’m not sure about Levant’s conclusion, but the series is worth sorting through for a related reason. Number 9 is the paragraph that really brought it home. Here’s the text:
That video [of police arresting a tiny old man] is bad enough. But imagine going truck by truck, extracting men, women and children? Here’s a vid from the Coutts border crossing. What’s Trudeau going to do — shoot them? Policing doesn’t work when the bulk of citizens don’t consent.
The video is the key part, though. It’s not of truckers, but of what looks to be hundreds of people blocking a road by riding horses down it! The next video is of a bridge that carries 25% of U.S.-Canadian trade completely filled with stationary trucks.
Did you know this was happening? It’s pretty likely that you did, oh Anchor Rising reader, but do you know because you get your information from mainstream, much less progressive, sources? Do you think the progressives’ core audience knows the extent of it? Probably not.
You can bet, though, that the people in public office making high-stakes political decisions are discussing it. You can also bet that they’re terrified that Canada’s rebellion will light the combustible tinder of American politics. Distractions like making Joe Rogan bend the knee might forestall things for a few news cycles, but then, they might whipsaw, combine with the trucker story, and add fuel to the fire.
They know this. And so, they have to begin letting some of pressure out of the fuel tank before it explodes, and easing ridiculous, performative mask mandates as COVID cases evaporate is an easy way to do that.
The lesson of the bubble is an important one to catch, though. The ruling party and its allies in the mainstream media control people’s understanding of reality so as to make their preferred policies more palatable, but when narrative control is central, rather than tangential — when public relations becomes the core function of government rather than a poorly lit office down the hall — natural incentives will lead to fiction stretching across an unacceptable reality. As that reality builds on itself, the fiction becomes a bubble.
People who haven’t been given an accurate picture of current events can’t factor everything into their subconscious calculations. If the trucker rebellion over the northern border can be written off as a temporary lashing out by ignorant people like your anti-mask-mandate neighbors in the Ocean State (as local progressives see us), then mask mandates might make sense (if you believe they have a positive effect).
If, however, we’re on the verge of a collapse of the North American economy that is likely to throw state and federal governments firmly in the hands of the MAGA people, progressives will only be clutching their mask mandates as they sink to the bottom of the political sea, having lost everything.
The dangerous part is when they realize that they are about to lose everything. The progressives are more likely to call for government violence and fixing elections than to acknowledge error. The question is how ideologically intoxicated the Democrat Party in the Ocean State has become.
Featured image by Mick DePaola on Unsplash.
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Recently, Rhode Island Twitter has become a display of people who seem deranged with fear about the end of mask mandates. It’s a curious puzzle.
Some of the known progressives are probably responding to the movement’s understanding that keeping people depressed and isolated is in their ideological and political interests, and that surely filters out into the general public, like contagious radiation. Naturally, however, the progressives in the public health bureaucracy are happy to lend some propaganda to the push.
Doug Badger gives a careful look to the study behind a widely shared chart from the CDC making masking look extremely effective:
The made-for-Twitter visual mischaracterizes the findings of the Feb. 4 study. That study was so poorly designed that the confidence intervals—the range of possible results, similar to the “+/-” in public opinion polls—were large enough to render its findings meaningless.
Of course, the anti-mandate side has folks who are willing to overstate their own case, and it can be difficult to know what the truth is. Taking it all in, I continue to think the reality is that masks can be effective for some people in some circumstances but cause more harm than good as a blanket mandate, especially in schools. The fact that schools look likely to be the last place unmasked shows that we’re not dealing with science, but with a mix of politics and fear.
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Bob Walsh, who has been the executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island as long as many of us have been paying attention, or even been present in the state, has announced his impending retirement.
Some on the conservative side are understandably happy to hear the news, but I’d caution a bit of circumspection for two reasons.
The first is that his replacement could be much worse. My impression may be wrong, but Walsh has always seemed to me to be enough of a political junky, who enjoys actual debate enough, that he stays closer to the line of fair play than is the case for many of his coworkers and close allies. In some ways, that may make him more effective, but it certainly allows opportunity for those who disagree with him.
The second is that he’s probably not going away. The letter that he sent to his union’s members explains his decision as giving him “time for another adventure or two.” Maybe that means trying his hand at mixed martial arts, or maybe it means applying his vast connections and practical knowledge to an even more extreme charge in his far-left activism… while opening up the highly paid slot in the far-left progressive movement in Rhode Island that he’s held for decades.
Maybe his departure will work out for truth, civil liberties, and the good of Rhode Island, but it’s far from certain.
Featured image by Tiago Donangelo Figueira on Unsplash.
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A recent college classroom conversation had a peculiar effect on me.
We were discussing Rerum Novarum, an 1891 papal encyclical published under Pope Leo XIII. Generally, the essay is a prescient (from my perspective) statement against socialism. That general theme received an encouragingly fair, even sympathetic, treatment by the class and the professor. In the midst of the lesson, however, as I knew it would, the following quarter-paragraph emerged for special scrutiny, even though it’s a brief tangent in 64-paragraph work. I provide the whole paragraph because the context is important to a reasonable reading:
… Finally, work which is quite suitable for a strong man cannot rightly be required from a woman or a child. And, in regard to children, great care should be taken not to place them in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently developed. For, just as very rough weather destroys the buds of spring, so does too early an experience of life’s hard toil blight the young promise of a child’s faculties, and render any true education impossible. Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family. …
In the field of nineteenth-century sexism, this is mild stuff, and one must stretch to make it representative of centuries of patriarchy. The concern of paragraph 42 is fair and reasonable working conditions, with the compassionate insistence that this judgment must be individualized to reflect the circumstances of the actual worker.
The clause about women being “by nature fitted for home-work” is certainly dated, although we too easily forget that the dating involves lived experiences, not merely an evolving culture. Sure, sweep away the revolutionary changes of electricity in the home and automobiles (which both post-dated Rerum Novarum) and Leo looks as if he’s holding to unreasonable sexism. Return those considerations — and many more — to the calculation, and a different picture emerges.
Simply put, a great deal more labor was necessary to maintain a household back then, and mobility was much reduced. That is, for “the well-being of the family” the need for somebody to focus on home-work was much greater, and the question of who should stay home is different from the assertion that women should do so… just because. Even within that context, one might insist there was room for Leo’s view to evolve further, but a reasonable critique in one direction does not justify an unreasonable application of modern life to the judgment of the past.
Indeed, reviewing the social advances of the last century and a half, a suspicion creeps in. The standard narrative is that social movements won their ground by beating back the rigid hands of greed and intolerance. The more accurate story seems to be (although not in all cases) that historical circumstances permitted the changes, making them practical, and the movements merely accelerated their realization. In some cases, one might argue the movements merely took credit for things that were about to happen anyway.
What affected me emotionally in the conversation wasn’t that this level of nuance is uncommon, but the impression that an utter lack of nuance is the common stance. Even the first sentence quoted above came in for criticism: “work which is quite suitable for a strong man cannot rightly be required from a woman or a child.” Take note that Leo specifies a strong man and that the assertion concerns what can be required, not what can be accepted. I repeatedly had to check the text to confirm that those words were there, because they were entirely unacknowledged.
Coming to this point in an otherwise encouragingly fair presentation felt like coming to the edge of permissible reality. The atmosphere veritably dared a retrograde participant to defend the notion that one can speak of such a thing as strong men. I did (of course), and the professor recognized that sounds of some kind had come out of my mouth, but we quickly moved on to the next point.
Frequently, I’ll complain of the way in which the news media shapes people’s sense of reality by ignoring certain people or certain stories. Others have made the point that progressives seek to control the language to make it impossible to think certain things, but I’d never before felt the significance of this prohibition so palpably. The experience was as if the truth literally could not be spoken. Words that I could see on the page were apparently not there for others, and when I offered testimony from my own time as a carpenter, it evaporated as if I’d never spoken.
Featured image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
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To begin with, let me apologize for the subject line. Once it occurred to me, I couldn’t let it go.
If you’re of a certain age, you may recognize the sexual undertones of the phrase, which I began thinking about after stumbling across a Twitter exchange between apparent progressive Liz Gledhill and known conservative Nicole Solas. both of South Kingstown:
Gledhill: All this GOP rhetoric that’s anti “pleasure based sex education” makes me really glad I never slept with a republican because it kinda seems like it would be terrible.
Solas: “if you don’t groom children you’re bad at sex”
Gledhill: “If we tell folks sex isn’t just for making babies, they might go onto have healthy, happy intimate adult relationships and forget their place in the patriarchy.”
This matter is an excellent example of the human capacity to firmly hold to a belief simply by definitional assumption. In Gledhill’s mind, there is no reason not to want political insiders and ideologues to mandate that unionized teachers must instruct other people’s children that all of life should be centered around pleasure and readily associated with sex, so opposition must be evidence of our own discomfort with that topic. Gledhill would likely make the contrasting assumption of a social work grad student on the board of Planned Parenthood who coos at her 18-month-old son about how good it must feel when he touches himself. Surely, she must really know how to pleasure other people in fulfilling ways, right?
Ummm…
The first step when marching forward to mandate what other people’s children must be taught should be checking whether your assumptions are true. Are conservatives terrible at sex, and do we have unhealthy, unhappy adult intimate relationships. Well, no. Indeed, evidence consistently emerges that conservatives have better sex lives.
This actually shouldn’t seem contrary to assumptions. The patriarchal extremes are much more prominent on Netflix and in progressives’ self-justifying imaginations than in real life. Generally, conservatives find that acknowledging human nature while treating sex as something more profound than mutual masturbation is a winning formula. A love life doesn’t get much better than a stable relationship of deep comfort, trust, and mutual concern in which a couple’s intimacy is implicitly connected with their longstanding love for each other as well as their children, and even with God.
Of course, the ideal isn’t always possible (although in this case, your odds are pretty good if you’re smart and reasonable), but no ideal is. That doesn’t mean we can’t base the way we think and teach about relationships on an ideal. In contrast, making the individual’s personal pleasure the basis for what we think and teach children is certain to cause isolation and misery and, yes, to contribute to the sexual grooming of children.
Featured image by Konstantin Makovsky on WikiArt.
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Among the encouraging signs that are beginning to peak out of the COVID chill like early buds in spring is that coverage of Dr. Stephen Skoly’s lawsuit hasn’t been limited to the website of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, of which he’s chairman, and national conservative sites like The Daily Signal. The Providence Journal published an article last week, as did WJAR (NBC 10). WPRI got around to it a few hours ago.
The unfortunate reality is that the past decade has seen the news media, particularly in Rhode Island, embed the preferred narrative of the left and the Democrat Party more deeply in its editorial decisions. A doctor with a reasonable case to make being forced out of practice over a controversial government mandate ought to have been on journalists’ list of deep wells. They could have profiles on him, deep dives into the data behind the state’s decision, personal interest stories on both sides of debate — those suffering from lack of his care and others affected by COVID.
But of the half-dozen or so major sources of news in Rhode Island, none has taken that opportunity. In fairness, their business models are changing, and that sort of story may be less economically feasible, particularly when it cuts against the grain of what their left-wing base of subscribers/viewers wants to hear.
Whether the reason for the lack of coverage has been political bias or the economic reality of the business, however, a little bit of thawing is hopefully a positive development. We may find reason to hope in this angle, from The Daily Signal story linked above:
“After four months of being forced out of work, I still held out some hope that all mandates might come to an end in mid February,” Skoly said in a statement.
He continued: “But now, with Rhode Island’s Speaker of the House [ K. Joseph Shekarchi, a Democrat] and Senate President [Dominick Ruggerio, a Democrat] openly planning with Gov. [Dan] McKee to extend his executive orders and unilateral powers for at least another two months … I am left with no choice but to file this lawsuit.”
One suspects many people are starting to have such feelings: Look, we played along; we tolerated huge impositions and fear-mongering; but now we’re sending signals that the tyrants and mongerers have to pull back.
Perhaps the news editors have their fingers up in the wind and sense the change. We’ll see.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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