If Republicans seriously want to foil Biden's statist plans, they're going to need better leaders than yay-hoos like these

 So President Biden is going to Pittsburgh today to unveil yet another exercise in redistribution and central planning on steroids:

President Joe Biden will unveil a $2.25 trillion U.S. infrastructure plan Wednesday -- paid for by steep tax hikes on businesses-- that his administration said will prove the most sweeping since investments in the 1960s space program.

The four-part, eight-year plan dedicates $620 billion for transportation, including a doubling in federal funding for public transit. It would provide $650 billion for initiatives tied to improving quality of life at home, like clean water and high-speed broadband. There’s $580 billion for strengthening American manufacturing -- some $180 billion of which goes to what’s billed as the biggest non-defense research and development program on record -- and $400 billion to address improved care for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Biden’s plan would increase the corporate income tax to 28% from 21%, and set a 21% minimum tax on global corporate earnings. The White House said tax increases will be “fully paying for the investments in this plan over the next 15 years.”

Granted, implementation is no sure thing: 

What is really going on is that many Democrats are hoping to use Biden's presidency to "jam" into law a variety of Democratic agenda items old and new. Their vast ambitions are hampered by the fact that they have a very narrow majority in the House -- so narrow that Democrats are trying to grab a seat in Iowa that has already been certified by state election officials -- and the Senate is tied, 50-50. American voters have not given Democrats the kind of dominant majorities needed to "transform" the country.

But preventing even the partial success of this agenda requires an opposition party able to articulate a consistent body of principles and not clever marketing aimed at "the working class," a strategy that smacks of industrial policy and protectionism, not the free-market economics that ought to be front and center: 

On a flight Tuesday from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, Ind., two leaders in the House Republican conference discussed a memo that argues that their party's future demands they "embrace our new coalition" because "President Trump's gift didn’t come with a receipt."

Why it matters: The document, titled "Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party," leaves no doubt that Republicans — at least in the House of Representatives — will be doubling down on Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.

The two leaders would be Kevin McCarthy, he of the changing of his tune from shouting into the telephone as the Capitol was under siege on January 6 to the Very Stable Genius, "Do you know who the f--- you're talking to?" to making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with that same VSG, and Jim Banks, whose district includes Fort Wayne and who is proud of the fact that he objected to the certification of Joe Biden's victory. This memo is full of language disparaging corporate donors and Wall Street.

It's pandering of the rankest sort. It's pitting classes of Americans against each other. 

Isn't the point of conservatism supposed to be that it's universally applicable? That it works for people in small heartland towns, suburbs and coastal metropolises? That it's impervious to shifting trends?

Why aren't the tree pillars 

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

still the lodestar for the party seeking to roll back statism?

But McCarthy and Banks seem determined to double down on the GOP's status as the stupid party.

Whether leadership can be wrested from such types is not at all certain. At the least, it's a daunting task, given how large Trump still looms over it. But whether done inside the party or some new vehicle for promulgating actual conservatism, it's going to fall to those who still understand that it is the only viable road forward to see if  actual conservatism can be tried. 

Heaven forfend that college students should be exposed to the idea that they can take charge of their lives

 It's important, in the polemics biz, to not gratuitously rant about every instance of higher-education shamefulness. They come down the pike with such regularity that we risk becoming inured to the cultural rot they further.

Occasionally, though, a story points up a particular kind of rot with such egregiousness that it must be remarked upon.

I guess you know who Suze Orman is. She's one of the superstars of the financial-advice-for-everyday-folks field, alongside Dave Ramsey. She's about empowering people. She's about as uncontroversial as one can get.

Well, except in the eyes of the trade association for student-affairs administrators. That's the bunch that's in the field of offering guidance to college and university students sorting out the life decisions facing them.

Their collective view of how to go about their work is downright chilling, as the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess recounts:

It’s one thing to insist that we need to address systemic challenges and structural barriers when talking about economic circumstances. It’s quite another to insist that anything else is verboten and to shout down talk of personal agency as “tone-deaf, uninformed and out of touch with the current socioeconomic climate.” Yet, that’s where the nation’s higher education establishment finds itself. 

On Wednesday, financial advice guru Suze Orman delivered the keynote for the annual conference of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (yeah, the acronym doesn’t match the name—don’t ask). Orman, who for decades has been a successful television personality peddling a combination of straight talk, encouragement, and basic financial know-how, delivered precisely what one might expect. Orman emphasized the importance of financial literacy, urged student affairs workers to push for better pay and more opportunities, and addressed the “obstacles to wealth” that an individual can control. 

The problem? Some vocal portion of the audience was outraged that Orman didn’t wade into “systemic barriers to wealth such as class, race or gender.” (Oh, and Orman referred to the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up, as “the hood” and “the ghetto.” If those terms are to be memory-holed, though, someone really should tell all the equity-minded academics who frequently use them in their writing.) While the complaints immediately took off on social media, there’s no way to tell how widely shared the concerns actually were—whether they were broadly shared or were the handiwork of a bullying few. 

Either way, within hours of Orman’s remarks, NASPA’s leadership blasted out a cringing official apology, begging forgiveness for having “missed the mark” by inviting a speaker who made comments “offensive to your lived experiences and to our NASPA values.” 

The apology went on to insist, “We cannot discuss financial literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.”

The organization went out of its way to throw Orman under the bus, opting for a familiar tone in declaring that “Suze’s comments tied self-worth to financial progress, ignored the difficulties that many individuals experience when navigating existing systemic structures and tools, and used offensive language to describe the area of Chicago in which she grew up.” Of course, NASPA has also said it will refuse to release the speech, making it impossible for any observers to judge this slur.

It’s appropriate to note that systemic issues can and must be part of any conversation on compensation and opportunity. But even Orman’s most determined critics were quick to acknowledge that, as Inside Higher Ed put it, her “address was not representative of the overall conference.” In other words, the issue was not whether systemic issues should be on the agenda, but whether an invited keynoter could talk about anything else.

The answer: apparently not. 

The stampede to disavow and belittle Orman may have been depressingly predictable, given that surveys find that left-leaning student affairs administrators outnumber right-leaning ones by a ratio of 12-to-1. When campus life is managed by those only too eager to kneecap an accomplished keynote speaker that they invited, the troubled state of free inquiry on campus is even easier to understand. 

You know, these higher education professionals might want to think about this a bit. Given that they work in a sector whose whole existence is premised largely on the notion that taxpayers and students should pay for colleges because they help people achieve better lives, a wholesale denunciation of personal agency seems like a perilous stance. If an emphasis on personal agency truly is irrelevant, or even offensive, it raises grave questions about how we think about the future of higher education.

Ya got yer "unjust systems," doncha know. 

By the way, this is a great opportunity to point out once again that only about 3 percent of Hispanics like the term "Latinx."

This push by the Left to make sure that our society never comes to a consensus that we look at each other as individuals rather than demographics that are either oppressed or oppressing is gathering momentum at a terrifying pace. 

Those orchestrating this have one end in mind: their own power. They have to keep large swaths of post-America viewing themselves as victims in need of government protection and provision in order to secure their perches in the catbird seat.

The damage is great and undoing it is going to require a level of courage that we'd better get prepared to muster. 

Modern media companies will put up with a lot from identity-politics militants, but they do want to see them keep basic facts straight

 You will recall that in a post a few days ago I mentioned a recent USA Today column by Hemal Jhaveri, that paper's sports "race and inclusion" editor - yeah, they have such a position - as one of several illustrations of how off the rails post-America has become with regard to identity politics militancy. She asserted that Oral Roberts University has no place in the NCAA March Madness tourney, much less making it to the Sweet Sixteen. She characterized the school's adherence to sound Christian doctrine regarding human sexuality as "hate."

I guess these days that's not something glaringly unusual. Lots of writers at lots of outlets have similar views.

But USA Today has subsequently canned her. It seems she got the ethnicity of the Colorado mass shooter wrong:

A USA Today editor announced Friday that she was terminated over a tweet she posted in reaction to Monday's deadly shooting in Boulder, Colorado that erroneously blamed a "White man" for the attack. 

Hemal Jhaveri, who served as the "race and inclusion" editor of USA Today's Sports Media Group, was one of many liberals who rushed to trumpet their judgment that a "White man" was responsible for the massacre at a grocery store that left 10 dead. 

"It's always an angry [W]hite man. always," Jhaveri wrote in agreement with Deadspin writer Emily Julia DiCaro, who had similarly written, "Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a [W]hite man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not."

After police identified the suspect as Syria-born Colorado resident Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, critics accused Jhaveri and the others who assumed the gunman was White of racism. 

"I am no longer employed at USA TODAY, a company that was my work home for almost eight years," Jhaveri wrote in an essay published on Medium. "On Monday night, I sent a tweet responding to the fact that mass shooters are most likely to be [W]hite men. It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online. It was a careless error of [judgment], sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet."

She's flirted with getting in trouble before over her views on whiteness:

Jhaveri went on to admit that she was "previously disciplined" for her Twitter activity, claiming, "My previous tweets were flagged not for inaccuracy or for political bias, but for publicly naming whiteness as a defining problem. That is something USA TODAY, and many other newsrooms across the country, can not tolerate" and that she was the victim of "micro-aggressions and outright racist remarks from the majority [W]hite staff."

She alleged instances when she was asked "not to use language that would alienate [W]hite audiences in stories about Black golfers and another instance when an editor asked her "what it was like to be Indian" since his daughter was marrying an Indian man.

"This is not about bias, or keeping personal opinions off of Twitter. It’s about challenging whiteness and being punished for it... Like many places, USA TODAY values 'equality and inclusion,' but only as long as it knows its rightful place, which is subservient to [W]hite authority," Jhaveri concluded. 

 

Well, toots, sometimes life's lessons have a bit of a sting to them. Wherever you land next, maybe try to get basic facts right in your pronouncements, even if they're just on social media.  

 

Thursday roundup

 Kamala Harris, as part of a live-streamed event focused on empowering women, will be having a conversation with . . . Bill Clinton. 

Saying the uncomfortable part out loud: Bryan Walsh at Axios says that even if this "degrowth" movement has appeal to someone - and there are some very silly people to whom it does - you can't have the kind of advancement in terms of comfort, convenience, safety and general quality of life the human species has enjoyed over the last two centuries without economic growth. 

Lee Ann O'Neal - who, it bears mentioning, is Korean-American - at Real Clear Politics says that there is no statistical data to back up the current buzz suggesting that bigotry-driven acts for which Asian Americans would be on the receiving end are much of a thing. 

Good read by Daily Beast senior columnist Matt Lewis entitled "The Evangelicals' Trump Obsession Has Tarnished Christianity."

Speaking of the Very Stable Genius, he's endorsing Jody Hice, a House member from Georgia who supported the attempt to overturn Biden's election, in Hice's bid to unseat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the receiving end of that interminable "I-just-need-you-to-find-11,000-votes" call in January. 

Andrew T. Walker has a piece at The Gospel Coalition entitled "Emabttled on All Sides, Does Religious Liberty Have a Future?"

North Korea just test-fired some ballistic missiles. 

The situation is dire; all the more reason to avoid clown-show ways of addressing it

 Earlier this month, I wrote a piece at Precipice entitled "Much Of It Comes Down To Tone." The point was that it's very tricky in this age of societal brittleness to convey an important message without turning someone off.

Specifically, a question facing conservatives is how to sound the alarm bell about the quantum leaps the Left is taking in imposing its agenda on our society and culture without risking association with the fever-swamp yay-hoos with woefully underbaked visions of what a desirable society looks like:

What Trumpists didn’t understand was that, by their tacit endorsement of their idol’s sloppily arrived-at worldview and word-salad-and-insult means of expressing it, they’d given the Left a grand opportunity to portray the Right as a boneheaded and thoroughly unattractive approach to modern life. American society’s great middle, the swath of the populace that is at most only minimally engaged in monitoring public policy or even cultural developments, was ripe for this sales pitch.

It proved to be poor tactics and strategy. Trumpists, Neo-Trumpists and their enablers far outnumber actual conservatives among elected Republicans, but the majority that counts - a party in control of the elective branches of government - is Democratic. 

The dismaying irony of it is that the Left is indeed fiercely determined to transform Western civilization into something grotesque, and has succeeded to an alarming degree. There is indeed a culture war raging. Societal sectors ranging from education to the corporate world to journalism to arts and entertainment are for all intents and purposes under the Left’s sway. Identity-politics militancy is unavoidable in every arena. The Left is also on the verge of realizing its redistributionist aims exponentially beyond its previous successes.

This was on my mind again this morning when I read this piece by Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark. His overall point is important, but there's one aspect of it that smacks of dismissiveness about the quite proper level of concern we ought to have. 

The gist of what he's saying is that since former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has assumed the top leadership role at Young Americans for Freedom, he's done a poor job of separating wheat from chaff - that is, keeping yay-hoos from getting mixed in with responsible conservatives among the public faces representing YAF's message. He notes that a recent YAF video, kicked off with Walker himself stressing that the Left's agenda has been gathering momentum for decades, then features appearances by some of the Right's most over-pungent figures: Dinesh D'Souza, Allen West, Liz Wheeler, Greg Gutfeld, Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles. Sykes then notes some recent additions to YAF's speakers bureau, and most of them are really fetid: Steve Crowder, Ted Nugent, James O'Keefe, Curt Schilling. 

Sykes is spot on that this is not a productive direction for YAF to be taking. 

But now, as to the aspect that smacks of dismissiveness: he seems not to be fully considering just what a jaw-dropping exercise in hard leftism the first two months of the Biden administration have been:

Walker’s video ominously warns unironically that “America is under siege,” with scenes of campus unrest, but does not mention the siege of the Capitol on January 6. It is as if it never happened.

But in Walker’s history, a lot gets dropped down the memory hole.

In its abbreviated history of the leftist takeover of America, the video draws a straight line from 1960s radicalism (Saul Alinsky) to Joe Biden, who, Walker says, is now “working to take over everything we hold dear.” 

Everything.

There are no details. But it’s bad.

Charlie, it has indeed been bad. It makes Barack Obama look like Joe Manchin. A partial list of ways in which this is so includes nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, an executive order on sexual orientation and gender identity that the Human Rights Campaign characterizes as "wide-ranging," pausing student loan payments, proposing "free" community college, establishing a national goal of disassociating the nation's electricity supply from fossil fuels by 2035, support for the Equality Act that was recently passed by the House and is now being deliberated in the Senate, and instituting an immigration policy that has led to the worst southern border crisis in 20 years. 

And Biden et al don't have the slightest reservation about it because they know they have the backing of most of institutional America: K-12 education, higher education, journalism, the arts and the entertainment world, most of corporate America, and even much of institutional Christianity. 

Regarding corporate America, we know that Coca-Cola backtracked on its "training" of employees on how to be "less white," but it's far from the only corporation involved in such activity. Here is what is going on at Cigna:

Employees at one of the nation's largest health insurance providers are routinely subjected to far-left critical race theory lessons and asked not to consider white men in hiring decisions, according to leaked documents and chat logs obtained by the Washington Examiner. 

Those who work at Cigna told the Washington Examiner that they are expected to undergo sensitivity training they consider racist and discriminatory. Lessons include reviews of concepts such as " white privilege," "gender privilege," and something called "religious privilege," which is described as "a set of advantages that benefits believers of a certain religion but not people who practice other religions or no religions at all."

Employees say they are pressured to comply with "inclusive language" outlines that suggest replacing terms like "Brown Bag Lunch" with "lunch-and-learn" or "grab n' go." 

Other suggestions include avoiding the phrase "No can do" and replacing it with "unavailable." Employees are told to avoid gendered descriptions of romantic partners or family members and not to use "Hip Hip Hooray" at birthday parties, so others feel included. 

Microaggressions listed include questions such as "Do you even know what Facebook is?" and "Are you a nurse?" Employees are also asked to go through a "Societal Norms checklist" and tick off boxes if they are "White," "Christian," or "Heterosexual." 

"Our inclusive culture at Cigna means that we're working hard to ensure everyone feels respected, welcome, and like they belong," wrote Susan Stith, the Cigna Foundation's vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and corporate responsibility, in an internal memo. "This extends to the words we use, including understanding when certain terms might be perceived as negative or hurtful, and being intentional about choosing positive alternatives." 

Cigna, valued in the tens of billions, boasts over 73,000 employees in offices worldwide. A 2020 Fortune 500 ranking placed the corporation as the No. 13 largest in the country as measured by revenue. 

The company recommends employees learn more about racism by reading controversial books such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How To Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. The book list also includes two works by accused left-wing terrorist Angela Davis, Policing the Black Man and Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis was arrested in 1970 on kidnapping and murder charges following a deadly attack on the Marin County Civic Center. 

Here's a recent example from California's public school bureaucracy:

California’s state Board of Education is set to make a decision this Wednesday on a new semester-long “ethnic studies” course that will be required for high-school graduation.

There have been four major rewrites, but critics say the final curriculum force-feeds students notions of how systemic racism, predatory capitalism, and “heteropatriarchy” (that’s a new one!) dominate their lives.

The curriculum calls for the “decolonization” of American society and focuses on cultures that have been “shortchanged.” The course description says these include “African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.”

A part of the model curriculum will have students taught chants to the ancient Aztec gods in order to make them better “warriors” for social justice. One of the gods mentioned in the chants is Huitzilopochtli, the god of human sacrifice.

“It’s a totalitarian worldview that is every bit as much a faith community as any religion,” says Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group in Santa Cruz. “In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion.”

It is also a frontal assault against free inquiry and common sense, and it’s soon coming to a school near you.

Private schools are not immune:

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)

This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen of these dissenters—teachers, parents, and children—at elite prep schools in two of the bluest states in the country: New York and California.

The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told—but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.

“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”

Not even sports journalism is untainted by identity-politics militancy now. Hemal Jhaveri at USA Today asserts that Oral Roberts University doesn't belong in the NCAA's March Madness race to the championship because it dares to adhere to sound Christian doctrine regarding human sexuality:

March Madness loves a Cinderella story, and this year it’s Oral Roberts University.

Oral Roberts, a mere 15 seed, destroyed brackets by toppling No. 2 Ohio State in the first round of the NCAA tournament and now enters the Sweet Sixteen after defeating No. 7 seed Florida 81-78 on Sunday.

Part of the joy of March Madness has always been watching smaller schools upset powerhouse programs, as kids from regional, unknown colleges and universities get their moment in the sun. Because everyone loves an underdog, Oral Roberts has become a fan favorite as people take their improbable run to heart and celebrate the tiny, evangelical university in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And yet, as the spotlight grows on Oral Roberts and it reaps the good will, publicity and revenue of a national title run, the university’s deeply bigoted anti-LGBTQ+ polices can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

Founded by televangelist Oral Roberts in 1963, the Christian school upholds the values and beliefs of its fundamentalist namesake, making it not just a relic of the past, but wholly incompatible with the NCAA’s own stated values of equality and inclusion.

While the school has been soundly mocked on social media for its archaic standards of behavior and code of conduct that bans profanity, “social dancing,” and shorts in classrooms, it is the school’s discriminatory and hateful anti-LGBTQ+ policy that fans should protest as the Golden Eagles advance in the tournament.

Twice in their student handbook, Oral Roberts specifically prohibits homosexuality. In their student conduct section, under the heading of Personal Behavior, the school expressly condemns homosexuality, mentioning it in the same breath as “occult practices.”

Students are expected to maintain the highest standards of integrity, honesty, modesty and morality…Certain behaviors are expressly prohibited in Scripture and therefore should be avoided by members of the University community. They include theft, lying, dishonesty, gossip, slander, backbiting, profanity, vulgarity (including crude language), sexual promiscuity (including adultery, any homosexual behavior, premarital sex), drunkenness, immodesty of dress and occult practices.

Also, as part of their honor code, the university requires students to abide by a pledge saying that they will not engage in “homosexual activity,” and that they will not be united in marriage other “than the marriage between one man and one woman.”

If you're looking for a sober, from-the-heart, deeply contemplated assessment of what's facing those who have been trying to preserve our civilization's foundations, may I suggest Rod Dreher's essay at The American Conservative entitled "You Aren't Crazy - - And You're Not Alone"? 

I had breakfast this morning with some Christian friends — a married couple and their kids — traveling through from southern California. They reported to me that everybody they know in church circles is reading Live Not By Lies. That’s always gratifying to hear, but what intrigued me was what they said beyond that.

The mom said that she’s finding that her Christian mom friends are devouring the book. She said that they have all come through reading Jen Hatmaker, Glennon Doyle, and those other therapeutic Christian-ish women writers, and have all been left feeling empty and lost. What’s getting to them all right now is their fears for their young children coming at them from this culture (especially in California). “The mama bear instinct is kicking in,” she said, “and we are now looking for something solid and true that can help us get through what’s coming.”

She said several times: “Being neutral is not enough.” What she meant is that it has finally begun to dawn on Christians in her circle that you cannot stay out of the fray, that you are going to have to take a stand. If you are not consciously and tenaciously a dissenter from pop culture, then you will be assimilated.

The husband talked about how a number of their Christian friends have become totally woke over this past year. The year 2020 was a time of separation. He said that it is now clear to his Christian circles that the people you go to church with aren’t necessarily the people who you want to be standing with when the bad stuff starts. He explained that a lot of church folks he knows are finding each other in small groups, even though they go to different churches. Some of them report that their churches may not be fully woke, but the churches are so desperate to avoid taking a hard stand on anything that might get them accused of bigotry that they are trying to avoid trouble.

These churches are not going to make it through what’s coming. And they are not going to prepare their people for it either. My friend said yes, this reality is sinking in with some of the Christians he knows, and they’re starting to act on it.

It really is a Kolakovic moment for America — a time to prepare, build networks, and dig in, before it all comes down. 

So the message with which Walker kicks off the YAF video is not wrong. In fact, it's bone-chillingly accurate. 

But any chance for mounting a countervailing force to what is happening is going to have to be long on understanding of what conservatism really is, and on what history has to teach us about the human condition, and a sense of the transcendent, and devoid of snark, ridiculous proposals, and myopic focus on partial aspects of the situation. 

The later in the day it gets, the less we can afford to squander our resources. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whether they're overtly following the Cloward-Piven strategy or just stumbling into reckless do-gooderism, the Biden administration's vision is going to sink us

 Here and elsewhere, it's been noted that the Biden administration, proceeding on the clear signals coming from the Democratic majority in Congress and that party's leftward rush generally, is imposing a degree of redistribution, identity-politics militancy and climate alarmism that Obama-era Democrats could only dream of. 

It comes with a hefty price tag:

President Biden’s economic advisers are preparing to recommend spending as much as $3 trillion on a sweeping set of efforts aimed at boosting the economy, reducing carbon emissions and narrowing economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich.

After months of internal debate, Mr. Biden’s advisers are expected to present a proposal to the president this week that recommends carving his economic agenda into separate legislative pieces, rather than trying to push a mammoth package through Congress, according to people familiar with the plans and documents obtained by The New York Times.

The total new spending in the plans would likely be $3 trillion, a person familiar with them said. That figure does not include the cost of extending new temporary tax cuts meant to fight poverty, which could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, according to estimates prepared by administration officials. Officials have not yet determined the exact breakdown in cost between the two packages.

It's ill-advised to make too much of any possible connection b between Frances Fox Piven and any given Democratic major player of the last two decades, but a number of them have taken her model for drastic change to the very nature of this nation into consideration, including Barack Obama.  

In any event, this goodie bag that the Democrats are currently intent on imposing on us is going to bust the  effing bank. 

Their argument for forging ahead is that we cannot afford not to, that the fate of the global climate, and the prospects for people of certain demographics to achieve the kind of sociocultural elbow room that you-know-which demographic has historically enjoyed, is too dim if we don't give them this kind of leg up, is appealing until you start to consider what two areas of inquiry with long pedigrees have taught us - I'm speaking of history and economics - have to tell us about what kinds of societies are able to maintain stability and which ones aren't. 

I don't know how many of the people working feverishly to bring this nightmare about have looked into their heart of hearts and seen that their vision is both unworkable and evil. It may be very few. I'm more inclined to think that it's a great percentage of them.

The ones in denial are the most frightening. 

They think their momentary amassing of power is going to be the end of the matter. They refuse to see that  it is going to work out like this:

Major [the pig] continued: 

          "I have little more to say. I merely repeat, remember always your duty of enmity towards Man and all his ways. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

. . . .

The Commandments were written on the tarred wall in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away. They ran thus: 

                                                 THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS

        1.Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 

        2.Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 

        3.No animal shall wear clothes. 

        4.No animal shall sleep in a bed.

        5.No animal shall drink alcohol.

        6.No animal shall kill any other animal.

        7.All animals are equal. 

          It was very neatly written, and except that "friend" was written "freind" and one of the "S's" was the wrong way round, the spelling was correct all the way through. Snowball [the pig] read it aloud for the benefit of the others. All the animals nodded in complete agreement, and the cleverer ones at once began to learn the Commandments by heart.

. . . .

"Comrades," he [Squealer the pig] said, "I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon [the pig] has made in taking this extra labour upon himself.  Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure!  On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility.  No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal.  He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves.  But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

. . . .

Benjamin [the horse] felt a nose nuzzling at his shoulder. He looked round. It was Clover [the horse]. Her old eyes looked dimmer than ever. Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written. For a minute or two they stood gazing at the tatted wall with its white lettering. 

"My sight is failing," she said finally. "Even when I was young I could not have read what was written there. But it appears to me that that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?" 

For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran: 

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

          After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters. It did not seem strange to learn that the pigs had bought themselves a wireless set, were arranging to install a telephone, and had taken out subscriptions to John Bull, TitBits, and the Daily Mirror. It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth—no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones's clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat, ratcatcher breeches, and leather leggings, while his favourite sow appeared in the watered silk dress which Mrs. Jones had been used to wear on Sundays.  

. . . .

An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse [where pigs and men were meeting]. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress.  There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. 

          Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. 

This is where we're headed, folks. It may be too late in the day to do anything about it. I pray that it is not.

But stay away from Trumpism. It will do us no good in trying to deal with this. 

We will need real conservatism. 

Alison Collins and the ongoing great collectivist leveling

 I'm no Randian. I generally cede the floor to Whittaker Chambers on this matter, who in his 1957 National Review takedown of Atlas Shrugged , made plain the reasons why objectivism was a different critter from recognizable conservatism.

There is one scene in The Fountainhead, though, that I think has had lasting value in the marketplace of ideas. Ellsworth Toohey, the architecture critic for The Banner newspaper, explicitly tells Howard Roarke why he's strived at every turn to thwart Roark's career as an architect. It's because he knows that Roark's designs are excellent, that his work is identifiable by its fealty to integrity on all levels. Toohey can't have that. He's after a world in which mediocrity and sameness characterize human endeavor. 

The scene was brought to mind when I came across the news item concerning San Francisco school board member Alison Collins, who has the same mission with an updated identity-politics twist.

I was heartened to see that she'd gone a bridge too far even in one of post-America's most progressive cities. She's facing a storm of backlash:

San Francisco School Board member Alison Collins is under significant pressure to resign after tweets she posted about Asian Americans back in 2016 were brought to light by a parent group seeking to oust her. As I pointed out yesterday, one of Collins tweets said, “Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS…They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.'” Today the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the significant backlash to those statements.

School board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to resign from the board.

“I’m shocked, dismayed, personally hurt by the remarks about Asian American students, parents and teachers,” Lam said, adding the board makes decisions that affect tens of thousands of people and it’s critical to have leaders representing all students.

Lam said she spoke to Collins on Friday.

“I asked, and I think it’s in the best interest of the school district and leadership for her to step down from the Board of Education,” Lam said…

Mayor London Breed also strongly condemned the posts, but did not directly call for her resignation.

“All of our young people in our schools need to feel respected and supported, and you simply can’t use words like that,” she said in a statement. “Asian people in this country have long faced very real racism, including here in San Francisco, and you can’t just broad brush their experience in a way that is so harmful and offensive.

Mayor Breed didn’t initially call for Collins’ resignation but she has since changed her mind. She now says the Asian community deserves better:

Collins has tried to backtrack, with some kind of drivel about how people have to understand the context of her 2016 statements, that she was in a lather because Donald Trump had just won the election.

The central point remains. Collins cannot abide by anyone rising above the average and distinguishing himself or herself by attaining levels of achievement, that, from a statistical standpoint, are by definition rare. 

She can't stand the thought of the human being digging deep into himself or herself to explore the potential of his / her mettle. 

This has been the common thread of the leftist vision as it has morphed from Marx and Engels through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro to - well, Collins. 

The individual soul is worth nothing to the leftist. The point is to take away that which makes a human being more than just another member of the animal kingdom, his or her nobility, his or her ability to distinguish between bad, good, better and best. 

Collins doesn't seem to have been chastened by the response to her pronouncement, but at least it's served to demonstrate that most people are still aghast at that degree of collectivism. Or maybe, and this is a less sunny consideration, merely the candor with which it's been expressed. 

The Alaska meeting went badly

 This was a test of how solidly the Biden administration's foreign policy is shaping up, an encounter with perhaps the most challenging actor on the world stage for the US. And China ate the US team's lunch:

Democrat President Joe Biden faced significant backlash on Friday following a meeting that his administration had with Chinese communist officials on U.S. soil, a meeting that was widely panned as tense, chaotic, and disastrous.

The meeting in Alaska came at the request of the Biden administration and was their attempt at trying to restart bilateral relations with China. Instead, after addressing some issues that the administration had with China, China openly mocked and attacked the U.S.

Chinese officials told Biden’s administration that the U.S. “does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength” and that “whether judged by population scale or the trend of the world, the Western world does not represent the global public opinion.”

China analyst Gordon Chang responded to the meeting by saying that China did “not come to Alaska to talk to the Biden administration.”

“They came to dictate,” Chang said. “China’s arrogant and insecure leaders are at their most dangerous. Deterrence is failing. Biden’s most urgent task is to reestablish it.”

You can be sure that North Korea and Iran read the tea leaves. 

Blinken et al need to do some retooling. 

 

The current regime is no less awful than the Trump era

 I hope that the developments of the last few days are putting to rest this nauseatingly ridiculous notion that conservatives who can't and never could stand Trump or the cult that surrounds him should "work with" Joe Biden. He's not some moderate foil to his party's leftist tilt. He's prominently part of it.

Consider what happened earlier today. The Senate confirmed one of his least qualified, most rabidly radical nominees, Xavier Becerra, to head Health and Human Services. 

He's a disaster coming out of the gate:

Becerra is an awful selection, considerably worse than Tanden. As I noted here, Becerra has no experience working at HHS, no medical background, and has never been chief executive of a state or any entity other than an attorney general’s shop.

How Becerra can be considered qualified to run HHS is beyond me. It may also be beyond Sen. Collins. She has noted his lack of relevant credentials.

Becerra is also terrible on policy. Becerra is a progressive activist whose experience in health and human services consists mainly in bullying nuns. As Rich Lowry reminds us, Becerra “went out of his way to target an exemption [from the Obamacare mandate] for the Little Sisters of the Poor.” His lawsuit against them “is still caught up in the courts even after it got rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.”

Becerra. . .chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.

What a guy. And what a “moderate” Biden is for nominating him.

The Little Sisters of the Poor litigation isn’t the only manifestation of Becerra’s extremism and bullying. The editors of National Review cite others:

In 2017, Becerra filed felony charges against the pro-life activists and citizen-journalists who had gone undercover to expose Planned Parenthood’s gruesome practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies to biotech companies. Becerra had not gone after animal-rights activists for similar investigative tactics. In response to Becerra’s actions, one writer at the left-wing magazine Mother Jones called the Planned Parenthood videos “a legitimate investigation, and no level of government should be in the business of chilling it.” Becerra was rebuked by the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times for his “disturbing overreach.”

In 2018, Becerra and the State of California were smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case NIFLA v. Becerra over a state law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion.

In 2019, Becerra aggressively opposed the merger of two religiously affiliated hospital chains in California because the resulting consolidated chain could reduce access to both abortion and gender-reassignment surgeries.

In 2020, Becerra was rebuked for his zealous defense of a California law requiring abortion coverage in insurance plans offered by churches. The Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that California’s abortion mandate violated a federal law known as the Weldon amendment, which prohibits federal funding of states and localities that force health providers and insurers to participate in or cover abortion. Becerra refused to comply.

Between Becerra’s lack of relevant experience and his pro-abortion extremism, it may be possible to pick up 51 “no” votes on his nomination.

Let’s hope so. I agree with Yuval Levin:

Even in normal times, when maybe there could be some kind of excuse for treating such an important job as a sop to the radical activist wing of the president’s party, Becerra would be an especially inflammatory choice. And these are not normal times. 

We are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and the secretary of HHS should be more experienced with the department and its work and with the issues involved, and should not be a figure who will enflame the kinds of fears that will undermine the trust of large swaths of the country in the government’s actions, guidance, and priorities.

And Vanita Gupta is not far behind: 

Ordinarily, senators should defer to the president on executive-branch appointments. But Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta is too radical to merit such deference. 

Gupta, nominated by President Biden to be associate attorney general, is a radical on criminal justice and race. She has been an avid participant in the morally corrupt mutual back-scratching known as third-party settlements. She has made vicious partisan comments that give ample reason to believe she will politicize the Justice Department. 

The third-ranking official at the DOJ has vast operational power behind the scenes, whereas his or her two superiors serve more as the public face of the administration. 

Gupta began her legal career with direct funding from the left-wing Soros Foundation. For most of her career, she has demonstrated animus against police and evinces a conviction that this nation’s institutions, law enforcement and otherwise, are inherently racist. She advocates a huge role for the Department of Justice in interfering with local policing. She is asking for confirmation despite recent comments of a notably objectionable nature, despite having demanded rejection of judicial nominee Ryan Bounds for (mildly) “insensitive” comments he made against “multiculturalism” when he was a university student a full quarter of a century ago.

By the standard she applied to Bounds, Gupta clearly fails the test of reasonable nonpartisanship.

As the associate attorney general, Gupta would advise on matters relating to law enforcement and would oversee the Community Oriented Policing Services. Yet her antipathy toward criminal justicelives loudly within her. She supports an almost complete gutting of the 1994 federal “crime bill” that played a large role in reducing street crime. She has repeatedly said that almost all police departments are guilty of “institutional racism [that] has infected [them] at every level and stage of the game,” and she advocates significant reductions in police funding and the forced closure of numerous jails and prisons. 

Gupta wants almost all bail requirements eliminated. She would abolish almost all mandatory minimum prison sentences, even for repeat offenders, and set a maximum criminal sentence, except in extremely rare circumstances, of 20 years.

If the only objections to Gupta involved her stances on criminal justice, one might yet defer to the president’s privilege of appointing people who share his policy preferences, even if they significantly contradict his own long record on those issues. Senators, perhaps, could give her the benefit of the doubt even on rather radical positions in just one area.

Yet Gupta is radical, truly radical, on racial issues. Just last summer, she testified to Congress that “structural racism is a feature of every American institution” and that every single American is guilty of “implicit bias,” especially regarding race. Indeed, she was so proud of making these accusations that she boasted about them in a series of tweets. Yet, piling evasion on top of her racial obsessions, she repeatedly equivocated last week when asked probing questions about these views by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Gupta combines the worst sort of radical racial views with an antipathy toward law enforcement in a particularly objectionable way. In 2005, while already a major player in civil rights law, she wrote a law review article — a serious piece by a professional, not some off-the-cuff statement from a college kid — in which she argued for a widespread adoption of “critical race lawyering.” She described this overtly race-focused approach like this: 

“Critical race theory, as an analytical tool, helps us understand that underneath the insidious veneer of such code words and mottos as ‘the rule of law,’ ‘colorblindness,’ 'equal justice for all,’ and ‘equal protection,’ the law is contingent upon the social and political realities of inequality and racial power.” 

“The very systems” in place in this new millennium, she wrote, are responsible for “maintaining the subordination of people of color.”

This wasn’t in 1955, mind you, before Congress passed two civil rights acts. This wasn’t in 1974, when cities across the country broke out in major discord over forced busing. This was in modern-day America, after protections against racism and redress for racist actions had long been enshrined in law.

Biden has explicitly said the the Equality Act, which the House passed last month and is currently being deliberating in the Senate, is a priority of his.

Attempts to quell unease about this bill include the arguments that it can't affect school curricula, that it preserves religious freedom, that it's irrelevant to abortion, that it upholds Title IX, that it won't affect parental rights, that the SCOTUS Bostock v. Clayton County decision necessitates this law, that doctors won't be forced to perform sex-change surgery or prescribe hormones to achieve that. It's all lies.

It's the greatest danger to religious liberty to date, it's the most pro-abortion bill Congress has ever considered, and it puts guys who are calling themselves females in the same locker rooms and shelters as actual females.

Only some 70 to 80 percent of the blame for these grotesque disfigurings of Western civilization can be placed on Biden and the Democrats, though. Republicans insisted on sticking with a loudmouth narcissist whose sloppily arrived-at worldview and word-salad-and-insult means of expressing it left no room for anyone with a serious understanding of the magnitude of what progressives are doing to our culture and nation to gain political traction.

Alas, we have to proceed from where we are. Conservatism has little official power at present. It may be that things have to get even more bizarre and evil before there's a general recognition that we're headed toward an unforgiving precipice.