Easter is completely meaningless at the Biden White House

 The administration has blasted away at America's foundation with a double whammy.

Egg designers are to stay away from the actual reason why Easter is celebrated:

Children of the National Guard are prohibited from submitting religious Easter egg designs for the 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” art event at the White House. 

The art contest is part of the White House’s Easter traditions, which include the annual Easter Egg Roll.

The flyer for the contest states that an Easter egg design submission “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.” 

And get this:

Children are asked to design eggs with images based on their own lives.

Yes, indeed, nothing more important than what these toddlers have so far experienced in their not-much-more-than-blank-slate lives. Maybe they get extra points for designs that express their feelings about those lives. Never mind the risen Lord and the life available when we take up our cross and follow Him.

And since March 31 is the day when, since 2009, the federal government has made people with delusions about what sex they are feel comfortable in those delusions, the fact that it coincides with Easter this year ain't gonna stop this president from proceeding with proceedings:

President Biden this week declared Transgender Day of Visibility for March 31 — which this year is on Easter Sunday.

“I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., president of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” the Friday pronouncement read. 

“I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination against all transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people.”

 Devout Catholic, my ass.

This is obviously not going to be the only noting of this trampling on sound-doctrine faith out there. But much of the consternation is going to come from the drool-besotted yay-hoos who intend to vote for the candidate who hawks pieces of his suit, calendars depicting himself in various macho fantasy settings, golden athletic shoes and sixty-dollar Bibles, who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the last election, who, in 1997, after being introduced to her by Ghislane Maxwell, spent several days with a 20-year-old model at Mar-a-Lago and then put her up in one of his New York apartments, and who, when asked in 2016 what Easter meant to him, couldn't come up with anything meatier than that the holiday means "family and get-together" in a "beautiful church."

I wanted documentation to exist that actual conservatives are disgusted with the Biden administration's stripping of Easter of all significance.

I realize it's a position that requires some fleshing out, but I still intend to stay home in November. 

 

 

Which kind of plunge into darkness do you prefer?

 On October 23, I published a Precipice post entitled "Just Can't." It really didn't cover new territory; it just offered the most recent substantiations for why I won't be voting next Tuesday. Here are some of the most glaring:

Now, a refutation of the idea that, say, the recent Reawaken America rally held in Manheim, Pennsylvania, is representative of the center of gravity of the GOP can be made. That was quite a sea of Kool-Aid those people were swimming in. But it’s flimsy in the same way that saying that the average Democrat is not an AOC tells us nothing about the locus of influence on the left.

But last month’s NatCon pow-wow was only a few degrees less non-conservative than the full-blown nutterism on display in Manheim. Speakers - up to and including sitting Florida governor Ron DeSantis - declared that it was time to employ the full coercive power of government to combat “wokeism.” (I personally hate that term, for reasons including its lack of specificity; I prefer to enumerate the identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution that inform 2022 progressivism.)

At The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson acknowledges that the term “conservative” doesn’t fit neo-Trumpism. He’s a slick one, that Davidson. He says all the right things to appeal to citizens who may not avail themselves of think-tank papers and conference proceedings but have their barometers in working order. Progressivism is indeed poisoning our culture, our government, our civic institutions and our economics. But he concludes his piece by offering the same prescription as the NatCon speakers. 

The characteristics of that era almost seem quaint now, shrouded in the mists of antiquity.

Since then, we've seen Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels say - I'm quoting verbatim here - "Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I'm elected governor."

How's this for an understanding of present world-stage dynamics? Marjorie Taylor-Greene says that "under Republicans, not one penny will go to Ukraine?"

Shasta County, California residents are answering their doorbells to this:

The canvassers in California's Shasta County in September wore reflective orange vests and official-looking badges that read “Voter Taskforce.” Four residents said they mistook them for government officials.

But the door knockers didn't explain where to vote or promote a candidate, the usual work of canvassers ahead of a big election.

Instead, they grilled residents on their voting history and who lived in their homes, probing questions that might have violated state laws on intimidation and harassment, according to the county's chief election official.

At one house, they interrogated a couple about the whereabouts of their adult daughter. At another, they listed names of registered voters and demanded to know if they still lived at the address.

The incidents highlight how a once-routine staple of American elections -- door-to-door canvassing -- has been adopted by former U.S. President Donald Trump's supporters since the 2020 election to prove his baseless claims of voter fraud, or potentially disenfranchise voters by stoking doubts about voter registration books.

That would seem to be of a piece with the phenomenon of drop box tailgate parties:

A black Jeep crept along Coury Avenue on Wednesday night, rolling by one of the many ballot drop boxes collecting early votes for the midterm elections. 

The driver, a man who declined to give his name, said he had made a pass at the box as part of a volunteer effort to stop a certain type of voter fraud that has captivated the far right, even though there is no evidence of its actually happening. He said it was the second night in a row he had driven by the box, this time after he had just taken his two children, who remained in the back seat, out for a sushi dinner.

He said he hoped to catch someone dropping off “100 ballots or 50 ballots.” No one did.

On Wednesday night, NBC News counted at least nine people watching the ballot drop box in Mesa, a small part of what has become a growing effort by some conservatives to monitor ballot drop boxes in hope of catching election fraud. Some people have stood watch at the drop box while wearing military-style fatigues and masks over their faces, prompting complaints to the Arizona secretary of state. NBC News did not observe any weapons.

No such drop box fraud has ever been found in significant numbers. But that has not stopped conspiracy theories about “ballot mules” — who supposedly secretly drop off hundreds of fake ballots in the middle of the night at drop boxes or election sites nationwide — from taking hold on pro-Trump parts of the internet. The conspiracy theory got its biggest boost from the widely debunked propaganda film “2,000 Mules,” which alleges such mules somehow changed the outcome of the 2020 election, even though repeated hand counts of ballots recertified the results.

The conspiracy theories have inspired action. Users on the Twitter-like platform Truth Social, which is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, have discussed forming “mule parties” or “drop box tailgates” since at least late July, looking to organize volunteers to surveil drop boxes. On that platform, the former president’s account has shared posts by users advocating for drop box surveillance, including the Mesa drop box.

One organization, Clean Elections USA, has been pushing for Trump supporters on Truth Social to create “ballot tailgate parties” to monitor drop boxes nationwide for suspected “mules” since August.

The man who spoke with NBC News said that he spoke to two women who were watching the drop box for suspicious behavior and that they told him to sign up for a time slot online through Clean Elections USA.

The Paul Pelosi shooting has once again demonstrated that the rot within institutional Christianity continues unabated:

he image was of a pair of underwear with a hammer, and the caption said, “Get it now: Paul Pelosi Halloween costume.” After a friend sent me the link, I was almost shaking with rage. Within an hour or so, Donald Trump Jr. would post the same image with a similar message, but it was the first one that left me angry—because it was posted by someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

Keep in mind what we have witnessed this week: A man with a history of following conspiracy theories—including 2020 election denial—broke into the San Francisco home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, took a hammer, and beat the Speaker’s husband until he needed critical surgery.

Police report that the man went through the house, yelling “Where’s Nancy?” The language is a direct echo of screams from insurrectionists on January 6, who swarmed outside the Speaker’s office after attacking and ransacking the Capitol.

Within hours of the Pelosi attack, the typical internet mobs spread lies and conspiracy theories about the event, some of them too vile and obviously fabricated to even mention here.

A friend asked why I was so upset about the allegedly evangelical man who posted the “joke” about Pelosi’s attempted murder. After all, we’ve seen for years his troll-like behavior on and off social media. “Why are you surprised?” my friend said. “That guy has shown who he is for years. I feel sorry for him.”

But that’s the point. This is not an isolated incident from one sad, angry, and “extremely online” guy. It reflects an increasing trend among some Christians.

Take for example Charlie Kirk, who responded to the Pelosi attack by saying, “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. … Bail him out and then ask him some questions.” That’s the same Kirk who claims to be a born-again Christian and whose name was merged with that of Jerry Falwell Jr. into the “Falkirk Center” at the nation’s largest Christian university (until Falwell’s departure).

While all of this is going on, hordes of online commenters and conspiracy theory websites either deny the attack happened at all—as a “false flag” by the Deep State—or positively delight in the humor of it all. Many of them have “Christian. Husband. Father” or some similar designation in their social media bios.

All of this would be bad enough if it were simply happening in the “fog of disinformation.” But even after the official Department of Justice affidavitwas released with details from the police officers’ interview with the alleged assailant—who admits to breaking into the Pelosi home to harm the Speaker—where are the apologies for spreading the lies? Where is the shame at delighting in what could easily have turned into murder?

When looking at some of the responses to the Pelosi beating, Mona Charen asked, “What the hell is wrong with these people?” The answer, of course, is hell.

We see the opinion editor of Newsweek trying to foment trouble in the aftermath of Brazil's election, even as Bolsonaro has, at least grudgingly, acknowledged his loss to Lula. His time-to-pay-attention-to-what-is-happening-in-Brazil tweet has engendered a thread replete with yay-rah affirmations from both post-Americans and Brazilians.

Consider Kari lake's rise to stardom. She quickly surmounted her early image as a flake and phony who had enthusiastically supported Barack Obama, using her 20 years of honing her chops in front of audiences as a Phoenix TV news anchor to present a polished veneer over the election denial at the core of her message. There's now talk about how she could leapfrog to the national political level in time for the 2024 election. 

Okay, that's a lot of keystrokes devoted to the hopelessly toxic state of the Republican Party.

But the Left has its own issues with political violence, as demonstrated by the beating a Rubio canvasser took in Florida, as well as this incident in North Carolina:

The FBI have launched an investigation after a gunman shot into the North Carolina home of relatives of a Republican running for Congress - with the bullet landing just feet away from where the candidate's children had been sleeping.

The shooting transpired on October 18 in Hickory at a home belonging to Republican Pat Harrigan's parents, as he fights for an open seat in the famously liberal 14th Congressional District, in a contentious race.

The congressional candidate's daughters, aged 3 and 5, were asleep in the bedroom directly above the room where the shooting occurred, with the bullet coming from a densely wooded area behind the house, piercing a window but not waking the girls.

I'm really not interested in getting mired in whataboutism regarding political violence, though. My problems with the Democrat party, and progressivism generally, arise at the policy level. 

Let me reiterate the areas in which leftist policy is driving the stake through post-America's heart: wealth redistribution, climate alarmism and identiy politics militancy.

One sees, with some frequency, social-media remarks about how those terrible Republicans want to end Social Security and Medicare. That's a fair accusation to lob at any wacko-type Republican, of which there are plenty, who doesn't flesh out an actual plan to deal with the abrupt jolt a lot of post-Americans would experience in the wake of such a move. But I don't see a damn thing from Democrats about how they would put those programs on a footing of solvency and avoid a situation in which interest on the national debt crowds out the government's ability to fund basics like defense.  

The Inflation Reduction Act did nothing to reduce inflation.

Student loan forgiveness has eroded post-Americans's notion of personal responsibility, and done nothing to address the administrative bloat at the nation's higher-education institutions. 

Climate alarmism has given policy shapers in government, as well as much of the corporate world, free reign to demonize fossil fuels and push for removing them from the nation's energy picture as quickly as possible, even as areas of the world aspiring to a Western level of advancement understand that play-like energy forms won't accomplish that. 

We are sitting on an abundance of dense, readily available and relatively inexpensive energy, but progressivism won't let us touch it.

Then there is identity politics militancy.

 Race hustlers are still at it, insisting that we sit down for yet more rounds of "difficult conversations," their euphemism for having those not yet on board shut up and be told why they are evil if they don't bring an awareness of color to every damn interaction they have with every one of their fellow human beings.

But there's a level of the identity front that destroys an understanding of basic reality and of what a human being is going back to the appearance of our species:

What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.

A red wave next Tuesday seems pretty certain. Leftist pundits' never-mind-the-polls-can't-you-feel-the-energy exhortations have a distinct whistling-past-the-graveyard feel to them.

And it comes down to one basic factor: a backlash against the coercive nature of the Left's attempt to impose what's described in the previous nine paragraphs. 

Education is a driving force in this. It's why local school board races are particularly hot in this election cycle. A whole lot of post-American parents are saying, "Not with my kid's noggin, you don't."

But you can't make a binary choice in this state of affairs. If you are a legitimately concerned parent, or say, a small business owner fairly far down the supply chain getting told by your customers that, in addition to quality assurance, you have to prove you're actively taking measures to implement DEI, are you really willing to let the likes of Kari Lake, Tim Michels or Marjorie Taylor Greene take the lead in the effort to do something about it?

I say the following having given considerable thought to whether it's responsible for me to go on record saying so:

Both of our major political parties are irredeemably toxic. Neither one can provide a way out of our nation's grim situation.

You do you next Tuesday, but know this: however you vote, all you're doing is gratifying your desire to see yourself as an agent of positive development. You're not really moving the needle. It changes nothing. Our descent into a very dark time will continue and accelerate, in one form or the other. 

 

 

 

 

Friday roundup

 Rays of light are still possible, even as late in the day as it is. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals says a university professor has the right to refer to a he as a he:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled Friday in favor of Dr. Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University, reversing a district court’s dismissal of his lawsuit against university officials. The university punished Meriwether because he declined a male student’s demand to be referred to as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. The court ruled that, based on the allegations in the complaint, the university violated Meriwether’s First Amendment rights.

“This case forced us to defend what used to be a common belief—that nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “We are very pleased that the 6th Circuit affirmed the constitutional right of public university professors to speak and lead discussions, even on hotly contested issues. The freedoms of speech and religion must be vigorously protected if universities are to remain places where ideas can be debated and learning can take place.”

“Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom,” the 6th Circuit wrote in its opinion in Meriwether v. The Trustees of Shawnee State University. “They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the professor’s free-speech and free-exercise claims. We see things differently and reverse.”

In January 2018, during a political philosophy class, Meriwether responded to a male student’s question by saying, “Yes, sir.” After the class, the student approached Meriwether, stated that he was transgender, and demanded that the professor refer to him as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. When Meriwether did not instantly agree, the student became belligerent and promised to get Meriwether fired.

The student then filed a complaint with the university, which launched a formal investigation. Meriwether offered to call the student by first or last name, but the student insisted that Meriwether use pronouns and titles consistent with the student’s gender identity. University officials ultimately rejected any compromise that would allow Meriwether to speak according to his conscience and sincerely held religious beliefs. Instead, they formally charged him, saying “he effectively created a hostile environment” for the student simply by declining to use the feminine pronouns demanded by the student. Later, they placed a written warning in his personnel file and threatened “further corrective actions” unless he articulates the university’s ideological message.

The 6th Circuit explained that if “professors lacked free-speech protections when teaching, a university would wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity. A university president could require a pacifist to declare that war is just, a civil rights icon to condemn the Freedom Riders, a believer to deny the existence of God, or a Soviet émigré to address his students as ‘comrades.’ That cannot be.”

On the other hand, according to Bruce Bawer at City Journal, things are not working out so well for Rob Hoogland:

At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.

Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.

The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)

Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 bookIrreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.

Hoogland was drawn ever deeper into a negation of his parental rights:

By eighth grade, her school was making special bathroom arrangements for her and requiring that she be addressed by her new name. Early in that school year, she was taken to see the province’s “top transgender psychologist expert,” known in court documents as “I.J.” When Hoogland first met I.J. a month or two later, he asked him to treat A.B. for depression. Instead, I.J. pronounced that A.B. was a “prime candidate for cross-sex hormones,” which, he promised, would “solve all her problems.” Accordingly, he referred her to the gender clinic at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, where, after a single hour’s examination, an endocrinologist decided to put her on puberty blockers and testosterone.

At the beginning of ninth grade, A.B. had her first appointment with G.H., an endocrinologist at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, to receive testosterone injections. But when E.F., the mother, contacted Hoogland during the appointment to ask for his consent, he withheld it. Four months later, in December 2018—by which time A.B. had turned 14—G.H. told Hoogland that her treatment would go forward, that Hoogland had no say in the matter, and that he’d no longer have access to her medical records. In defense of this decision, G.H. cited a 1993 amendment to the British Columbia Infants Act—which permits doctors to prescribe birth control for, and perform abortions on, young people whom those doctors judge to be “mature minors,” and to do so without parental knowledge or consent. Now, this amendment was being used to allow the medical treatment of gender dysphoria in “mature minors,” also without parental consent.

Shortly after hearing from G.H., Hoogland took the matter to provincial court, where A.B.’s treatment was suspended twice. In February 2019, the case went to the supreme court of British Columbia. Among the respondents to Hoogland’s petition were E.F., I.J., and G.H., plus the British Columbia Children’s Hospital, the provincial ministry of education, the local school district, and a half-dozen counselors and officials at both the elementary and high-school levels.

The case filing stated that A.B. had “gender identified as a male” since age 11 and had “informed his school counsellor of that when he was 12 years old and in Grade 7”—information withheld from Hoogland at the time. The same document cited A.B.’s suicide attempt, linking it not to a romantic rebuff but to gender dysphoria and stating that, in G.H.’s view, a “continued delay in treatment” would risk another suicide attempt. Affidavits by international experts brave enough to oppose the administration of testosterone to teenage girls were summarily dismissed.

Instead of recognizing that very few, if any, 14-year-olds are in a position to understand the grave implications of sex-change therapy, the judge, Gregory Bowden, ruled that A.B. was a “mature minor” and that her consent, by itself, was thus “sufficient for the treatment to proceed.” And instead of being guided by caution—which would have been wise, one should think, in a case involving such radical measures—Bowden bought fully into the trans-activist line that a further delay in A.B.’s treatment would be injurious to her. It’s also significant that Bowden denied Hoogland’s lawyer a relatively routine 40-day adjournment to prepare.

That wasn’t all. Bowden placed remarkable restrictions on Hoogland. He was forbidden to try to persuade A.B. to stop treatment. He was forbidden to address her by her birth name. He was forbidden, in any conversation with anyone, to refer to her as a girl or to use female pronouns to describe her. If he were to do any of these things, ordered Bowden, it would be “considered to be family violence”—yes, violence—under the Family Law Act. That’s par for the course today, when certain words are viewed as acts of violence, while objective acts of violence—such as the use of chemicals to permanently alter developing bodies, and the use of scalpels to remove healthy organs—are regarded as purely benign.

Soon after Bowden’s ruling, A.B. began gender-transition treatment, but Hoogland persevered with his legal fight. In violation of Bowden’s order, he also spoke in public and gave interviews about the case. In April 2019, in response to an application by A.B., Judge Francesca Marzari tried to quell these public appearances. Noting that there had been “substantial online commentary [i.e., reader comments on articles about the case] analogizing A.B.’s medical treatment to child abuse, perversion and even pedophilia,” and that A.B.’s doctors had allegedly received threatening emails, Marzari ordered Hoogland to stop trying to talk A.B. out of receiving treatment for gender dysphoria and to stop communicating with others—including media outlets, and A.B. herself, but excluding his lawyers, the court, doctors, and other authorized persons—about A.B.’s decision to receive hormone therapy.

Instead of recognizing that Hoogland was acting out of concern for his child, Marzari painted him as a selfish bigot. His conduct, she wrote, was causing A.B. “a significant risk of harm.” He was “publicly rejecting his [A.B.’s] identity, perpetuating stories that reject his identity, and exposing him to degrading and violent commentary in social media.” Marzari adduced no evidence to support any of these assertions. That said, Hoogland, added Marzari, “has been irresponsible in the manner of expressing his disagreement [with A.B.’s decision] and the degree of publicity which he has fostered with respect to this disagreement with his child.” Marzari also seconded Bowden’s description of Hoogland’s “rejection of A.B.’s gender identity” as “family violence.” 

 

 

Mike Gonzales of the Heritage Foundation, writing at Law & Liberty, reviews the book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Stephen R. Soukup.  A lot of corporate acquiescence to lefty do-gooderism can be traced to the introduction of the "stakeholder capitalism" model:

American business was about to change, as the new love for the scientific method turned into the pursuit of “scientific” planning for businesses, including a new player, the “stakeholder”—the employees, the consumers, and the residents who may live near a plant—whose interests supposedly diverge from those of the “shareholder.” The eager supporters of stakeholder activism gave the idea a superior moral force—the narrative that what mattered was making profits was supplanted with the theory that stakeholders were ends in themselves. The stakeholder became superior to the shareholder and subject to the “planners” actions. And the superiority was not simply moral, but also in terms of the bottom line. Soukup quotes professors Thomas Donaldson and Lee Preston as writing in 1995 on the evolution of the stakeholder model that “whatever their methodologies, these studies have tended to generate ‘implications’ suggesting that adherence to stakeholder principles and practices achieves conventional corporate performance objectives as well or better than rival approaches.”  Stakeholder analysis became, Soukup tells us, “a key concept in corporate strategic analysis and planning.”

The problem here, writes Soukup, is an old one: these planning theorists “applied purely systemic, scientific methods to phenomena that were not easily shoehorned into a scientific method,” i.e., human affairs. In one of the book’s best lines, Soukup writes that “the little human animal has a mind of his own and defies behaving in ways that fit the statistical model.”

The supporters of stakeholder theory—and also of the obviously false idea that the interests of the stakeholder and the shareholder always diverge—needed a foil, and Soukup makes a good case that they set up a strawman opponent in the ideas of Milton Friedman, especially a 1970 essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine.

In the essay, the monetarist economist, who would win a Nobel Prize six years later, explained that the corporate “manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation” and that his responsibility was to “conduct the business in accordance to their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible.” This somehow was traduced later as a “cult of shareholder value” which, to critics, meant short-termism and ignoring the interests of “stakeholders,” things Friedman didn’t say and wouldn’t have said because they’re nonsensical. “None of this matters,” writes Soukup. “The only thing that matters is the myth of Friedman, the myth of the greedy shareholder and the rapacious capitalists, the myth that shareholders and stakeholders must, always and everywhere, be opposed to one another.”

At First Things, Scott Walter takes a deep-dive look at Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of Black Lives Matter. 

Tevi Troy's essay at National Affairs, "How To Defend Free Speech," is a worthwhile contribution on that subject, but he may be a little too optimistic about the success of the endeavor. Says it depends on a "unified conservative movement." Good luck with that. 

Ed West, writing at UnHerd, in an essay entitled "The Tyranny of Diversity Training," says that that toxic trend is now permeating Britain. 

This Harvard Business Review article entitled "Why Diversity Programs Fail" is from 2016, but is a timely accompaniment to the essay above. 

Yet another sign of how late in the day it is in post-America: A Gallup poll shows US church membership falling below a majority for the first time ever. 

LITD has looked at the trend within the Republican Party to cultivate some kind of working-class orientation, building on the populism that Trumpism was based on. Marco Rubio's recent pronouncements. The Jim Banks memo. But Andrew Trunsky at The Daily Caller says that Illinois Republican Rep. Peter Meijer has a different approach that might appeal to the populists:

He even introduced his Direct Dollars Over Government Expenses ($DOGE) plan, which would have given $2,400 checks to qualifying Americans instead of the $1,400 outlined in the American Rescue Plan. His bill, however, was nearly $1 trillion smaller than the ARP, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Mar. 11.

After all, it has simplicity going for it, and pro-freedom types greatly admire the elegant simplicity of freedom-oriented policy:

“Direct cash payments have long been part of the conservative playbook,” Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “There has always been an attraction among free-marketers for the most basic type of assistance, which is a direct cash payment … Basically, you just give people money.” 

In an essay entitled "American Culture Is Broken; Is Theonomy the Answer?" at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew T. Walker come to the conclusion that it's not:

There are serious criticisms of the movement—criticisms so severe that Theonomy should be repudiated as an evangelical framework for understanding the mission of the church and the relationship between civil and sacred, eternal authority and spiritual authority.

In sum, the error of Theonomy is that its hermeneutic stretches beyond the Bible’s understanding of its own authority. From this mistaken hermeneutic comes serious distortions, with drastic consequences for the church’s role in fallen political orders.

Theonomy is a facile hermeneutic that channels an eschatology of triumph. Historically undesirable, it instrumentalizes religion, blurs church-state relationships, and jeopardizes religious dissent. And it proves unnecessary because of how other covenants showcase the benefits of common grace and natural law.

Rather than become mired in interpretive problems amply demonstrated by many conservative scholars elsewhere, the simplest observation to make about Theonomy as a hermeneutic is that it misunderstands the relationship between the old covenant and the new covenant—which leads to misapplications today. 

It correctly stresses a continuity in the original moral force behind Israel’s civil law. It overlooks, however, the covenantal discontinuity in applying and enforcing the particulars of Israel’s civil law, especially since theocratic Israel’s expiration. God’s purposes with Israel were unique in design compared to his relationship with other nations.

The laws God laid down with Israel were meant to enforce and protect the exclusivity of that relationship. Israel thus played a singular role that other nations aren’t called to replicate down to the level of their judicial laws.

Believing that Israel’s civil law serves as a model for contemporary civil government, Theonomy tends to downplay the moral law’s existence predating Israel and Ten Commandments. But murder, for instance, wasn’t permissible until the sixth commandment prohibited it. It was wrong from the beginning (Gen. 1; 4; 9) because it destroys an image-bearer of God. It is rooted in who God is and his purposes for creation, as revealed from the very beginning.

American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis asks "Does America Really Have An Infrastructure Crisis?" and concludes that it doesn't:

America doesn’t have an infrastructure crisis. Nor does it have a job crisis, even though Biden chose to put that in the name of his plan. If current economic forecasts are anywhere close to being correct, the story of 2021 will be one of rapid economic growth and plunging unemployment. Don’t forget that before the pandemic, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low, and wages were rising fastest for lower-income workers. The economy didn’t look in need of reimagining just over a year ago. It just needed a tight labor market. That might well be where we are headed again thanks to both the reopening economy and a tsunami of already approved federal spending. By the way: It’s kind of a red flag when politicians talk about infrastructure in terms of jobs created. The goal of an infrastructure program should be to create better infrastructure. Government at all levels should focus on building and maintaining the most compelling projects.

Brings to mind Bastiat's broken window theory.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.