The thorniness of extricating the nugget of truth from the tangle of other considerations

 This post is about two people I simultaneously find gravely problematic and admirable. They are Rod Dreher and Ron DeSantis.

Dreher is editor of The American Conservative and has a record of penning ringing defenses of that which is inarguably defensible. He distilled his concern about what the marginalization of Christianity was going to mean for practicing believers into an important 2017 book, The Benedict Option.  He wrote the introduction to Carl Trueman's The Rise of the Modern. Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution, an exhaustive analysis of how we got to a point at which transgendered bathrooms were considered as something to which there was a right. 

But he has become enamored of this flimsy notion of a "national conservatism," to the extent of not only expressing admiration for Victor Orban, but moving to Hungary. This move really mars his standing as an articulator of he good, right and true.

Good Rod shows up today in a piece for his magazine in which he properly lauds Florida governor Ron DeSantis for serving notice that that state's educational system will not brook DEI or an African American Studies curriculum driven by the thought of Robin G. Kelly and Keeyanga Yamahtta Taylor. 

Dreher effectively conveys the significance of DeSantis's stance:

I can hardly believe that a leading Republican politician actually has backbone in the fight against wokeness. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the real deal. Fresh news out of the Sunshine State:

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a series of proposals for Florida’s public universities at the State College of Florida on Tuesday.

One aspect of the proposal would eliminate all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) “bureaucracies” at public universities.

DeSantis said his administration will propose core course requirements that are “focused on giving them the foundation so they can think for themselves” and will be grounded in “actual philosophy that has shaped western civilization.”

“We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in zombie studies,” he said. “And so this is gonna make a difference.”

Watch the video of his announcement here.

It's happening. It's actually happening. The Bad Guys are going to scream bloody murder, but finally -- finally -- we have a political leader who is taking a hard stand against these woke commissars. DEI bureaucracies at American universities have exploded in recent years, in part because the woke cartel has intimidated state legislators and others by calling them bigots who don't care about "marginalized" students if they resist. Are these bureaucracies actually making campuses better, or are they making schools more conformist by instituting programs and policies that reinforce a sense of grievance, and intimidate dissenters into silence? Would the ton of money spent on these apparatchiks' salaries be better spent hiring more teachers, or raising the salaries of professors? Finally, DeSantis's move is going to force these militants to justify their existence. 

He offers a taste of the screaming of bloody murder to which he alludes:

Expect more garbage like this New York Times op-ed slandering DeSantis's ban on the AP African American History course. The author fumes:

An unrelenting assault on truth and freedom of expression in the form of laws that censor and suppress the viewpoints, histories and experiences of historically marginalized groups, especially Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities, is underway throughout the country, most clearly in Florida. The state’s Department of Education recently rejected a pilot Advanced Placement African American studies course from being offered in Florida’s public high schools.

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law — which would limit students and teachers from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender — Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices and erase the full and accurate history and contemporary experiences of Black people.

Bullsh*t. I'll tell you why in a second. One more quote from the essay:

It’s no coincidence that these attacks are targeting not just historically marginalized people but also our very experiences of intersectionality. Mr. DeSantis recently rubbished the inclusion of “queer theory” in the A.P. African American studies course that was rejected, seeming to deny the need for future generations to learn about the contributions of queer Black American icons like Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. Florida’s H.B. 1557, more widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, also limits conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms and, like “Stop WOKE,” makes clear that the State of Florida seeks to suppress and target people’s identities.

Why is it BS? Because DeSantis clearly said the other day, when he announced his ban on the course, that he is not going to allow the AP course to propagandize Florida students for tendentious, highly ideological reads on black history, under the guise of teaching about black history (which he fully supports). The lie here is that if you don't give these ideological culture warriors everything they want, then you must be a BIGOT. In fact, DeSantis is doing his job: making sure that the public school students of Florida aren't forced to read neo-Marxist propaganda as history. 

He ends by sharing this encouraging development:

UPDATE: Well now!:

One of Governor Ron DeSantis’ most vocal critics supports the state’s decision to reject the College Board’s AP African American Studies course for high schoolers. When asked his thoughts on the recent controversy, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor [who is black -- RD] blasted the course as “trash,” according to Tallahassee Reports.

“There is grave concern about the tone and the tenor of leadership’s voice from the highest spaces in our state being hostile to teaching of African American history. Well frankly I’m against the College Board’s curriculum,” Proctor said.

“I think it’s trash. It’s not African American history. It is ideology,” he continued. “I’ve taught African American history, I’ve structured syllabuses for African American history. I am African American history. And talking about ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ and all of that for the struggle for freedom and equality and justice has not been no tension with queerness and feminist thought at all.”

We're seeing a display of Good Ron as well as Good Rod.

But there's the governor's other side as well. He intends to eke out his political future within the framework of what the Republican Party has become. This was most evident last fall when he campaigned for Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake and Blake Masters. 

This kind of drag-our-brand-over-the-finish-line politicking muddies the waters to a disturbing degree. Increasingly, the general public conflates MAGA yay-hoo-ism with actual conservative principles because that's just about the only arena in which one sees those principles being defended.

Many of those who have undertaken the self-appointed task of upholding an alternative - that is to say, rooted in an embrace of heritage - vision of conservatism are apparently uninterested in this whole area of our national life. You won't find an essay like this in The Bulwark. It doesn't appear to be on the Principles First radar. Adam Kinzinger is now a private citizen, It would be nice to see him weigh in. 

I'm afraid that the reason for reticence on the part of these people and outlets is that they don't want to endanger the big-tent premise on which they're inviting people to gravitate toward their project. Culture-war issues strike them as too icky to address.

And then there's the fact that DeSantis, should he jump into the presidential race, is going to be increasingly drawn into a nasty standoff with the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump. I'm not sure I can see DeSantis having the chops to remain elevated above Trump's style of political combat. 

Truth won't cease being truth, no matter what happens. But its ability to get an airing continues to diminish  as we move further into the age in which nihilism reigns. 

 

Van Jones slathers an unneccesary layer of race consideration onto a truly horrible incident

 For a while, I was really inclined to give Van Jones the benefit of the doubt. He behaves civilly on panels with conservatives. I have even aligned with some of his observations in recent times.

But he slammed it into reverse with his chiming-in on the Memphis beating death of Tyre Nichols by five police officers. He went to the most vulgar, Kendi-esque level, and left himself open to the charge of lobbing a cheap shot by saying "it could be a factor."

It? Come on, you know damn good and well what "it" is:

. . . racial animus can still be a factor, even when the perpetrators are all Black. And that’s especially true if these actions are a part of a broader pattern and practice within the Memphis Police Department. 

It’s a sad fact, but one that’s old as time itself: People often oppress people who look just like them. The vast majority of human rights abuses are committed by people who look exactly like the people they are abusing.

Thomas Chatterton Williams gets right to the heart of what is so poisonous about such brazen speculation:

Thomas Chatterton Williams

@thomaschattwill

What if, stay with me, these five men were actually agents responsible for their own reprehensible actions and not merely hapless puppets being manipulated by the invisible hand of inescapable and omnipotent white supremacy?

Exactly.

An arrested suspect in a reckless-driving incident died and the five police officers who handled the incident are under arrest for second-degree murder.

Any further prattle about what happened is a naked attempt to foment societal trouble in order to increase the chances for influence and power among those doing the prattling. 

And it reduces all those involved to the status of agency-deprived individuals. Distilled to its essence, it's feigned pity, calculated to perpetuate the racialist sludge in which certain elements want to see us permanently mired. 

A bracing world-stage snapshot

 Yes, I know much on the domestic front bears watching. All the drool-besotted, performative clowns in he House of Representatives (including George Santos, who is even too hot a potato for his fellow drool-besotted performative clowns) have their committee assignments. Kevin McCarthy is even speaking in a laudatory manner about Marjorie Taylor Greene ("I will always take care of her"). Nobody on either side of the aisle has the clarity, maturity or courage to address the real causes of the debt and deficit situation. The latest incident of police brutality, this one in Memphis, is leading, in clockwork fashion, to a fresh round of civil unrest. 

But some current developments on the world stage are enough to stand one's hair on end.

Let's start with this:

A four-star Air Force general sent a memo on Friday to the officers he commands that predicts the U.S. will be at war with China in two years and tells them to get ready to prep by firing "a clip" at a target, and "aim for the head."

In the memo sent Friday and obtained by NBC News, Gen. Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, said, “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me will fight in 2025.” 

Air Mobility Command has nearly 50,000 service members and nearly 500 planes and is responsible for transport and refueling.

Minihan said in the memo that because both Taiwan and the U.S. will have presidential elections in 2024, the U.S. will be “distracted,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan. 

I agree with Tom Nichols that the West must supply Ukraine with M1 Abrams and Leopard II tanks. Western nation really ought to send F-16s as well.  The stakes are existential. But Russia is, as one might expect, furious about it, becoming more explicit in its wider-war talk:

"There are constant statements from European capitals, from Washington, that the sending of various weapons systems, including tanks, to Ukraine in no way means the involvement of these countries or the alliance [NATO] in the hostilities that are taking place in Ukraine," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. "We categorically disagree with this... everything that the alliance I mentioned and the capital [Washington] does is perceived as direct involvement in the conflict, and we see that it is growing."

A senior Russian politician and ally of President Vladimir Putin cast a dire warning exactly one week ago of how Moscow might respond to a perceived military defeat in Ukraine.

"The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war can trigger a nuclear war," former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

North Korea is taking the opportunity to strengthen the notion of an alliance of rogue states:

North Korea condemned on Friday the decision by the United States to supply Ukraine with advanced battle tanks to help fight off Russia’s invasion, saying Washington is escalating a sinister “proxy war” aimed at destroying Moscow.

The comments by the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un underscored the country’s deepening alignment with Russia over the war in Ukraine as it confronts the United States and its Asian allies over its own growing nuclear weapons and missiles program.

North Korea has blamed the United States for the crisis in Ukraine, insisting that the West’s “hegemonic policy” forced Russia to take military action to protect its security interests. 

It has also used the distraction created by the war to accelerate its own weapons development, test-firing more than 70 missiles in 2022 alone, including potentially nuclear-capable weapons believed able to target South Korea and the U.S. mainland.

 

 

She elaborates:

 Kim said the Biden administration was “further crossing the red line” by sending its main tanks to Ukraine and that the decision reflects a “sinister intention to realize its hegemonic aim by further expanding the proxy war for destroying Russia.”

“The U.S. is the arch criminal which poses serious threat and challenge to the strategic security of Russia and pushes the regional situation to the present grave phase,” she said.

“I do not doubt that any military hardware the U.S. and the West boast of will be burnt into pieces in the face of the indomitable fighting spirit and might of the heroic Russian army and people,” she said, adding that North Korea will always “stand in the same trench” with Russia. 

North Korea is the only nation other than Russia and Syria to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, and has also hinted at plans to send workers there to help with rebuilding efforts. 

Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have been heating up again, to levels not seen in years.  

The situation is not helped by the fact that conservative-leaning political parties in Israel have of late been skewing toward the kind of nutty populism we see out of, say, Hungary, or the U.S. Republican Party. Netanyahu is trying to tamp down the crazy to some extent:

For now, Mr. Netanyahu has restrained some of his more hard-line ministers from fully exerting their will in the West Bank.

This month, he ignored demands from Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister, to stop the army from evicting an unauthorized Israeli settlement in the territory. But it is unclear how long he can continue to deny his coalition partner: He has promised to give Mr. Smotrich power over the military department that oversees construction and demolition in Israeli-administered parts of the territory.

We shall see how that goes. On Friday, the Jerusalem Post gave column space to a speculation about how close the country is to civil war. 

And there's the development I noted here the other day: Iran's intention to station warships in the Panama Canal. 

So let's keep our distractions under control. A number of people are emotionally invested in the outcome of the AFC championship and the Super Bowl. Awards season is getting underway for the entertainment industry. There's always some cool new restaurant to try. Our dogs and cats are cute.

The backdrop for such pleasantries merits out attention, though. Serious people with evil intent are not resting. Our times are as historic as any we've lived through or read about. 

Thursday roundup

 Francis X. Maier of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has a piece called "My Kind of Antichrist." The title had me scratching my head until I grasped the contour of his argument. What he's referring to is how the Enemy impacts each of us individually. After looking at the notions of a personal antichrist put forth by Robert Hugh Benson and Romano Guardini, in which a human figure proves to be the crafty architect of the world's ills, Maier gets to wha we really need to be attentive to:

These weeks between Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday belong to Ordinary Time on the Church calendar. They’re a kind of Great Plains on the Christian wagon train to our real home. They’re where everyday life happens; where the choices are made and the directions are set for our final destination. In other words, they matter. The Antichrist of Benson, Solovyov, and Guardini may one day show up on the human horizon; the Devil has a taste for grand melodrama. It appeals to his pride. But such things are not for us to know, and speculating on them is an indulgence and a waste.

Instead, we might all of us, and each of us these days, profitably read the First Letter of John, especially 4:1-6 and 2:1-6. It turns out that “antichrist” comes in all shapes and sizes. As John says, it’s the spirit of all things not of God. Which means that my kind of antichrist – and yours – is the sin we find easiest to absolve or ignore in ourselves; the sins hardest to resist and most congenial to our appetites. Their name, if we’re honest, is Legion.

And admitting that is the first step toward making Ordinary Time, conversion time.

At his Substack, Ted Goia posits that, by the broad set of criteria by which we need to consider a city's musical importance, we should elevate one above the other contenders:

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience? 

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice—but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain. 

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD. 

At Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu exhaustively, and by process of elimination, zeroes in on what she thinks an airtight definition of a woman is.

Along the way, she gives a measured assessment of what she thinks Matt Walsh got right and got wrong in searching for the answer to this question:

Right-wing polemicist Matt Walsh got in on the conversation this year with a documentary simply titled What is a Woman?  It’s a “hostile engagement” piece in the tradition of Fahrenheit 9/11, presented as a kind of ideological exposé in which Walsh skewers the gender-ideology gurus with ease. I dislike this genre, mainly because it opens such wide pathways to dishonesty and distortion. A documentary, by its nature, cherry-picks details to create a smooth narrative. It is a singularly terrible medium for exploring hot-button topics like this. Still, I mostly agree with Walsh on substance, and he did a fairly good job of illustrating some of the deep contradictions in modern gender theory. 

I still had one major complaint. When a documentary is titled with a question, I read this as an implicit promise to answer that question. But he doesn’t, or not really. Supposedly Walsh is a guy who just “likes to understand things,” and he presents that wide-eyed faux-curiosity to the activists and gender theorists. If understanding is really the goal of this film though, it ends in tragedy. Walsh chuckles at Jordan Peterson’s observation that a man who wants to know what a woman is should “marry one and find out.” Then he returns home to his own wife, preparing food in their kitchen, and poses the question to her. She tells him nonchalantly that a woman is, “An adult human female… who needs help with this jar of pickles.” Cue the laugh track. 

Call me a no-fun feminist, but I’d have preferred an answer thoughtful enough to stand on its own, sans pickle gag. I think the audience deserved that, after watching Walsh crusade around like a truth-in-gender Socrates, demanding honest responses to “the question you’re not allowed to ask.” I realize, of course, that the plebeian ending was very deliberate. Walsh wants to imply that sensible, grounded people should not need to pose this question. They know what a woman is, just like their grandparents and great-grandparents before them. From the mouths of sandwich-making housewives, we can still receive commonsense truths now forgotten by our “learned scholars.” I get it. But I still do not approve.

It’s clear enough, certainly, that most humans historically would have laughed at Walsh’s title question. And they did know what a woman was, at least in the sense that they were able to distinguish men from women with a high degree of accuracy. Even today, most people can do this, despite the changed names and puberty-blocking medications. Most of us can tell when the clerk in the frilly pink blouse is a man, even if the name tag reads “Jessica.” We don’t say anything. But we can tell. Gender ideology feels insidious in part because it asks us to “forget” or decline to notice things that we all really see and understand.

Lu concludes by saying that if we define a woman as the adult human being who is equipped o bear children, it actually liberates women and opens the door to productive conversations about the potentialities of all people:

The functional-reproductive definition can help with the fractious issue of gender stereotypes. It liberates us both from needlessly restrictive stereotypes, and from gender-equality crusades. One need not conform to common stereotypes to be a woman, and yet, it should not alarm us to find that some stereotypes broadly hold. I myself prefer football to fashion, and philosophy to party planning; I recognize that this is somewhat unusual for a woman. So what? Most people are outliers in one way or another, and this need not be either laudable or shameful. People are unique. In social settings, we may sometimes find ourselves leaning on “soft stereotypes,” simply because we don’t have time to get to know every person intimately. However, if we properly recognize the difference between defining features of sex and more incidental broad-based trends, we should be able to cultivate some flexibility, abandoning inapplicable stereotypes as we get to know particular individuals. 

Moving beyond the realm of etiquette, we can see that sex has real social and ethical implications, which the functional-reproductive definition makes clear. Men have a stronger sex drive, while women’s biological role in reproduction is far more arduous. Those two facts fundamentally explain why women have sex-specific vulnerabilities, which must be accounted for in both law and culture. Women sometimes need sex-specific protections against the possibility of male predation, and human societies must also compensate somehow for their disproportionately-heavy reproductive burden. Mothers need help, and fathers need to be encouraged to develop relationships with their offspring. The human race has long had a solution to both problems: marriage.

In modern times, we have also become more sensitive to the potential for women’s opportunities to be limited unreasonably when protection becomes the overwhelming social priority where their sex is concerned. Motherhood is a very good thing, but it does not exhaust the full range of women’s potentialities. Women’s sports exist because it seems fitting, in an opportunity-rich society, to cultivate and celebrate the athletic potentialities of both sexes. Women, as a group, are a bit slower and weaker than men, but the female body was built to run, jump, throw, and swim, just like the male body. Women’s sports showcase and develop the female body, which is why it is unjust to allow a man to win the top prizes. That undercuts the purpose of the sport, just as a men’s race would be rendered pointless if a horse were permitted to win first prize. 

Sex is biological, but it goes beyond biology precisely because human reproduction is very important. Children need protection and nurturing, and adults need to learn to respect both their own, and the opposite sex’s, sexual and reproductive powers. But we also need to learn not to reduce people to their reproductive potentialities. Women are more than wombs, just as men are more than Darwinian “selfish genes” seeking to leave the greatest possible number of offspring. Sexed bodies have real significance, but this is just one aspect of human life; people are much more than just representatives of their sex. It can be difficult to understand all of this in a society that is obsessed with identity, and deeply confused about sex and reproduction.

That’s why it is important to define “woman.” The goal is not to vanquish ideological enemies with a knockdown conversation ender. Instead, the conversation should start right here.

At The Public Discourse, Joshua Spalding has a piece called "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton." The title comes from a William F. Buckley quip, which in turn comes from a thought from Eric Voegelin:

Buckley coined the phrase “don’t let them immanentize the eschaton” after reading Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, which stated that “a theoretical problem arises . . . when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.” While Buckley’s witty slogan distilled something important from Voegelin’s opaque argument, Voegelin’s concept was never intended as some “gotcha” soundbite for conservatives to use against liberals. Voegelin’s concern with immanentizing the eschaton was part of his broader and lifelong project to better understand the intersections of history, politics, and religion.

What can we do in our own time to not immanentize the eschaton?

Christians must make a clear and unequivocal distinction between the historic Christian faith and the misleading political religion that is more pervasive on the right that anyone seemed to realize. We should start by heeding conservatives’ longstanding warnings about immanentizing the eschaton. Then, I suggest the following strategies.

1. Speak truth. “Within this eschatological view of politics,” John Jalsevac explains, “truth claims are no longer approached as facts to be adjudicated by applying old-fashioned rules of logic and evidence, but rather as tests of loyalty—spiritual loyalty.” Mass media targeting specific audiences magnify this problem, allowing each side to marshal their sources, contributing to further entrenchment. Finding a way out of this environment is daunting, but it starts with telling the truth. Truth has inherent power; the more truth is spoken, the easier it becomes to speak. Perhaps no one grasped this better than Eastern bloc dissidents like Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn and Vaclav Havel, who were sustained through their long nights of suffering under Communist regimes by the conviction that living in truth is never in vain.

2. Stop demonizing others. The apocalyptic politics of an immanentized eschaton divides people into sheep or goats, children of light or children of darkness—actual language that was heard at the rally-turned-riot. “If only it were so simple!” cried Solzenhitsyn from behind the Gulag’s barbed-wire: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

3. Demote politics. When people find their core identity and ultimate purpose in politics, no one really wins. Politics turns into a Nietzschean battle for survival. Historically, Christians have recognized the subsidiarity of politics and the primacy of other, more foundational aspects of human flourishing: family, community, and church. Demoting politics to a secondary position can help us recover individual responsibility and vibrant personal agency—and the meaning found in these more basic aspects of the human experience.

The American Enterprise Institute's Ruy Teixeira has two important pieces recently.

At UnHerd, he looks at "Joe Biden's False Optimism." Despite some legislative wins and  favorable turns of events on the world stage, it's not all sweetness and light for the president. Those pesky cultural issues, which Trumpists screech about in the most boneheaded manner, are real, of concern to a lot of voters, and are not going away.

At his Substack, he concludes his three part series entitled "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism." I'd encourage you to read parts one and two as well. He traces the arc of that devolution over the past several decades. He arrives at a conclusion similar to the one he expresses in the above piece. Democrats are going to have to ignore the alarmists and get on board with solutions that acknowledge that normal-people energy forms - oil, coal and natural gas - will unavoidably be the big players in the mix for the foreseeable future.

Nicholas Goldberg, writing at the Los Angeles Times, says if Gavin Newsom is seriously considering a run at the presidency, he's going to have to come up with a career narrative that sidelines his obviously privileged background:

The story he’s been stuck with is neither uplifting nor, to use the popular phrase, relatable.

So he’s out to fix it. Which is probably why he’s getting more personal, telling more anecdotes and trying to recast himself as someone who faced and overcame obstacles in his day.

“A child of divorce and dyslexia, trying to find my bearings” is how he described himself at age 10 or 11 in his unusually personal inaugural addressearlier this month. He described his mom, juggling three jobs. The difficulties he faced in school.

“I couldn’t read, and I was looking for any way to ditch classes,” Newsom said. “I’d fake stomach aches and dizziness. I’d bite down on the thermometer in the nurse’s office trying to make the temperature rise past 100.”

The emphasis on family history and personal challenges was “a departure from past speeches,” reported The Times.

Newsom described how his great-great-grandparents came from County Cork “during the first years of California’s statehood.” The first William Newsom, he said, was a working-class Irish immigrant who became a San Francisco beat cop.

I'm not saying it's not all true. No doubt it is. But it certainly appears to be part of a search for a compelling, curated back story that suggests not everything came so easily — one that humanizes him and normalizes him for voters. If he does eventually decide to run for president, expect his stump-speech bio to be rehashed in a campaign autobiography that lays it all out on the printed page.

“What’s the first thing you need to do when you’re running for president or thinking about it? You tell your story,” Katie Merrill, a Democratic political strategist, told The Times.

(Expect to read less in that book about the affair he had with his campaign manager’s wife when he was mayor of San Francisco and how he sought treatment for alcohol abuse. That’s not the kind of overcoming-adversity story voters are looking for.)

By the way, I’m not blaming Newsom for any of this. Personal narratives are an age-old part of politics.

Why do voters crave them? Partly because overcoming obstacles in life is honestly admirable. But also because humans respond to stories more than they do to policies, statistics, polemics, resumes or canned rhetoric. And because we all love a Horatio Alger, up-from-humble-beginnings tale.

Finally, I have a few essays of my own to steer you to. At Precipice, my latest is entitled "The Deadly Idea That It's a Done Deal: Have We Validated Nietzche's Assertion That 'God Is Dead, and We Killed Him"?

My latest two at Ordinary Times are "Notes on the Delicious Art of Arguing" and a eulogy to Jeff Beck.

 

 

 

What most accounts of DeSantis's rejection of an AP pilot course aren't telling you

 If stories about this that are showing up in your social media feed, email or news digest of choice merely let you know that the Florida governor has put the nix on a pilot Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in his state's higher-learning insitutions, you're getting incomplete information.

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (whose book Radical in Chief opened my eyes to Barack Obama's background - not just Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, but a host of people and organizations I'd not previously heard of, such as the Midwest Academy and the Annenberg Challenge, and Heather Booth, Robert Creamer and Greg Galluzzo) presents the complete picture of the situation at National Review:

The debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum and wrote about it in September, laying out its socialist agenda and its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Unfortunately, no one could judge the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculumand made it public.

In another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s decision.

The most serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4: Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. Now let’s get down to cases.

The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.

Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.

The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.

One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.)

Far from BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,” exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and “revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among [Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”

Virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.

The APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives” covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations? It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political recruiting tool.

The three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for them in two successive topics.

The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.

The topics on reparations and M4BL are part of a special section of the course. That section presents four different topics touching on “Contemporary Issues and Debates.” This special set of four optional topics allows teachers to instruct students to focus in-depth on only one of the topics in question. The selection of a single topic out of the four options can be done by a whole class, by small groups of students, or by each individual student. In addition to reparations and M4BL, students can focus either on “Incarceration, Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” or on injustices and activism regarding “Medicine, Technology, and the Environment.” Because students choose only one of the four topics to explore in-depth, all four topics are omitted from the final AP Exam. Students, the guide says, cannot be held responsible on the test for the topics they didn’t choose to focus on.

Sorry about excerpting at such length, but this is important stuff. 

This is not some kind of overall endorsement of DeSantis in whatever his political career plans may be. The guy can be a performative jackass. He bases too many of his actions on tactical political calculations (like campaigning for Kari Lake). But he's spot on here.

While the substantiation that Kurtz provides is indispensable, I'd offer a bit of shorthand advice to any high school or college student, parent, school board member or college trustee: run, don't walk, in the opposite direction from any "academic discipline" with the word "studies" in the name. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The current debt-ceiling standoff and the two irreconcilable views of government's proper scope

 We're back at a juncture we've found ourselves at several times. It works a little differently from the way such a juncture does in a household. (And here, we're assuming a responsible couple heading that household, a couple with a common goal of ensuring financial soundness in the present and for the future.) In a household, the people involved come to an agreement along the lines of, "Okay, given our present income, present savings plan, and reasonable confidence that both can be maintained, if we ever have to go in yet, here's how much we can handle, but we must never that."

Government has options for skirting the firmness of such an agreement. It can tax citizens more, issue bonds and print money. Congress never worries about whether those measures will actually be taken when spending bumps up against the agreed-upon limit. Treasury bond holders still seem to have enough confidence in the full-faith-and-credit premise of the arrangement to keep things shored up, at least on a band-aid basis.

How did all this get started, anyway?

It’s a legal limit dating back to 1917 that caps the level of debt that the federal government can assume. Once the U.S. hits the limit and exhausts ways to pay its bills, Congress must lift the ceiling in order for the government to continue to borrow to meet its obligations. If it doesn’t, the country could be forced to default, which experts warn would be economically catastrophic.

Republicans have waged heated battles over the debt ceiling, most notably in 2011, but they have always been resolved in time.

Now, it's true that the rush to resolve a debt-ceiling crisis is not about new spending. Government is on the hook for the debt in question. But the fact that government keeps coming to a moment like this means that no one ever thinks of operating government at a debt level far enough below the ceiling to avoid trouble.

In light of that, is it grandstanding for McCarthy to insist on spending cuts in his negotiations with Biden? That case could be made; McCarthy has something of a track record as a grandstander. But his stance is predicated on a question worth asking: At what point do we have the difficult discussions about the reason we're always up to our eyeballs in debt?

And what might that reason be? Well, that's why the discussions would be difficult:

Politicians promised you benefits, but never funded them.

That’s according to truthinaccounting.org, which noted that there’s $96.3 trillion owed in promised but unfunded Medicare and Social Security benefits — $55.1 trillion for Medicare and $41.2 trillion for Social Security.

While Uncle Sam has $5.9 trillion in assets, the $129 trillion owed in bills — including military and civilian retirement benefits — means the U.S. is in the hole for $123 trillion. Just the unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Social Security add up to $96 trillion.

It is a stunning amount coming due over the next 75 years. The Treasury Department sticks its proverbial head in the sand and does not even list the liabilities on the balance sheet of the federal government.

But not to worry, taxpayers will not actually be paying for this. How could they?

Instead, older people who have been promised these benefits likely will not be paid in full.

If by some magic we do manage to pay for these promised benefits, it is young people who would be saddled with trillions in extra taxes with nothing in return.

Unelected policy makers in the twentieth century decided for the nation that government should address two major givens of human life - old age and sickness - that had, to that point, been outside its purview. Frances Perkins, the fourth labor secretary of labor, was the architect of social security in the 1930s (as she was of the minimum wage and unemployment insurance, two more unprecedented intrusions into the life of the citizenry).  Medicare was the brainchild of a Democratic congressional majority in the 1960s who found it unacceptable that only 60 percent of older Americans had health insurance.

These programs and the thinking behind them didn't appear spontaneously. They have their roots in the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Thinkers such as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson looked at the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country and concluded that the Madisonian framework for American government was no longer sufficient to address the issues of the day. Furthermore, legislators elected from the populace around the country lacked the knowledge to deal with those issues by crafting bills to target each one. In their view, what government needed to do was hire a cadre of experts in areas such as transportation, infrastructure, labor, health care, education and agriculture that would flesh out with details broad mandates enacted by Congress.

This fundamentally changed the average citizen's view of his or her relationship to government.  Government, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, was now assuming a seemingly benevolent role as well, and private citizens would be henceforth dependent on it for basic necessities. No longer was the state just tasked with keeping bad guys foreign and domestic from knocking us over the head. Now it would assume responsibility for the planning of an individual's life course. 

Over the course of the last 90 years, people have come comfortable with the trading off of having choices as to how to plan for their basic well-being - liberty, if you will - for being unburdened with having to think about such daunting matters.

There are think tanks and lobbying organizations dedicated to the quixotic task of rolling this all back, but without an understanding on the part of the country's inhabitants of the preciousness of their freedom to steer their own destinies. That, in turn, requires an understanding that individual sovereignty is the image and likeness of the Creator's sovereignty. 

But it's pretty late in the day for a conversation like that, isn't it?