Thursday roundup

The Left is big on using poster children for its causes. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent takes on the one it's currently gushing over for her stunt in service of the lie that the global climate is in a state of crisis:

All you need to know about Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old autistic child from Sweden, is that the left expects you to listen to her, comply with her, and never question her. She is the newly appointed high priestess of climate change.

It is eye opening that the left has decided an obnoxious and spectacularly unaccomplished child must be the voice to which we must listen. It is a cult. Her arrival has been met with top of the fold status in various publications as if she is some conquering hero.

She is no hero. She is a child. She is known for being brash and rude, which the left says is the super power autism gives her. Yes, they actually believe this. She is known for wanting civic protest to advance her cause. She is the child leader of the global warming cult who got the privilege to sail on a yacht owned by a prince.

Secularism has become a religion unto itself. Thunberg is just the latest in a growing hierarchy of religious leaders for secularism. Her arrival is heralded like a visit from a pope. There is a messianic zeal that she will bring some level of repentance and revival. The media will cover her every move and thought.

The thoughts, though, are what exactly? She thinks the world is warming and everyone must do something, including protest. She is fueled by progressive mythology currently fixated on an Amazonia fire that is being exaggerated in the press as celebrities circulate decades old photographs of previous Amazonia fires.

Go home, Greta. The people who worship you do so because they are using you as a shield against themselves. They demand we not question you and give your ramblings a level of authority most reserve for scripture. It is by faith they believe you will lead them to some promised land. You won’t. Why? Because you are an unaccomplished sixteen year old whose only power is making older progressives swoon and TV reporters smile.

Elijah Cummings's staffers are disinvited for return trips to an ICE facility after acting like complete jerks on the one last week.

Universities understandably liked to brag about their alums and faculty who have achieved great things in fields such as medicine and science by putting their portraits together on a wall.  Now some of them are becoming "uneasy" with those walls because of lack of "diversity."

Hugely important essay by John Hood at National Review on how Trumpism will likely flame out after its namesake moves offstage. There's just no core set of principles or philosophical basis for it:

Contrary to the calumnies offered by both progressives and populists, Trump isn’t just a blunter version of previous Republican presidents and conservative leaders. He isn’t Ronald Reagan with a shorter IMDb page. He isn’t an Internet-age Barry Goldwater. To the extent Trump has had consistent political convictions over the decades, they have little to do with American constitutionalism, individual liberty, resistance to totalitarianism, or defense of traditional values. Trump has long advocated a strident protectionism — Japan was the main villain of his narratives during the 1980s, as China is today — and expressed contempt for politicians with significant political experience. Both exemplify garden-variety American populism. Both are also rhetorical devices designed to cloak the schemes of special interests in the apparel of popular sovereignty.

When conservative leaders and voters embraced the Trump candidacy in 2016, many did so as a political transaction. If he agreed to nominate constitutional conservatives to the federal bench, pledged to advance traditionally conservative approaches to tax and regulatory policy, and focused relentlessly on beating Hillary Clinton, they’d sign up. He did. They did. This arrangement did not in theory require reshaping American conservatism in any fundamental or lasting way. In practice, however, some who supported Trump grudgingly in 2016 have found themselves thrust by our polarized politics into a role of Trump-explainer, if not Trump-whisperer. Others, for various reasons, have freely and enthusiastically become reflexive defenders of the president. Among the latter are leading voices of the new nationalists. They are playing with fire. They may well get burned. I’d rather not see the wider conservative movement scorched with them.

To be fair, the new nationalists have done their best, explicitly and repeatedly, to distance their emerging movement from white nationalists, alt-right fakirs, strident isolationists, and other assorted cranks. That’s much appreciated. Alas, their precautions will likely prove inadequate, in part because their cause has so many prominent champions, including but not limited to the president, who are prone to rhetorical excess and theatrical provocation. Trump can’t help himself, truly. He’s going to wake up tomorrow, or the next day, with some stray thought that a prudent leader would set aside. Trump will tweet it. When tragedy strikes, as we saw in the aftermath of mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio, the president will recite some well-written remarks and likely mean them. Before too long, though, he’ll be back on Twitter. He’s not winning new converts to the conservative cause there.

I don’t know if Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020. Neither, respectfully, do you. We should have learned from 2016 not to predict election outcomes with great confidence. I do feel comfortable predicting, however, that Trumpism as a political phenomenon will not long outlast him. He is wearing on America’s nerves. He is wearing us out. To the extent that the new nationalism looks and feels like an attempt to flesh out the political and economic dimensions of Trumpism into a durable political coalition and governing philosophy, its fate is bound up with his own. I would not bet on a favorable long-run outcome. I hope American conservatives don’t, either. 

While LITD is recommending hugely important essays, this one by Mary Eberstadt of the Faith and Reason Institute at Quillette entitled  "'The Great Scattering: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied By Family Life" is a bracing read. In the course of articulating her main point, she also talks about the role of family dissolution in the ruination of popular music:

Pop culture weighs in, too. In a 2004 Policy Review essay called Eminem Is Right, I documented how family rupture, family anarchy and family breakup had become the signature themes of Generation-X and Generation-Y pop. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music—the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before—is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Snoop Doggy Dogg—these and others have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. That answer is: dysfunctional childhood. During the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as artifacts of 1950s-style oppression, millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family had done to them.

In 2004, identity politics was not the omnipresent headline subject it is today. Even so, the effect of family decline on the sense of self already was appearing writ large across popular music. Tupac Shakur rapped about life with a single mother and no male parent, including in his 1993 Papa’z Song, about a boy who has to play catch by himself. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, both towering figures in 1990s rock, were children of divorce, and both referred back to that event repeatedly in their songs and interviews.

Jacki Deason at the Washington Examiner says that the G7 nations, rather than try to impose "green" energy policy on their developing brethren, should level the playing field so that the developing world can have access to normal-people forms of energy and thereby grow economically and enjoy societal advancement.