The Art Institute of Chicago recently announced an end to its 60 years-running docent program. 122 volunteers, averaging more than 15 years experience, who gave “tours to millions, including more than 100,000 schoolchildren each year, many from the city’s mostly poor, black South Side” (h/t Bari Weiss), are being fired. Their transgression? Being “too white and too well off.”
DC Comics is changing Superman’s motto to “Truth, Justice, and A Better Tomorrow.” Apparently they got the message (from the CRT cognoscenti, I presume) that “The American Way” is now a bad thing. After all, Richard Delgado, the grand poo-bah of Critical Race Theory, demands we question “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Yep, The American Way is now a Bad Thing. Oh, and Superman is now bisexual, because simply being woke is not enough to offset his white maleness, I suppose.
Apparently, even being a good “ally” who believes all the correct things and does good for the poor and communities of color is not enough any more. The anti-racism mindset that has leaked out of academia and progressive klatches now requires discrimination and unequal treatment. Under the law, if people of pallor don’t voluntarily prostrate themselves.
Public education, which has been in the hands of progressives for half a century (and it shows), is being dumbed down even further. “Woke” mayors like the erstwhile Warren Wilhelm, Jr. are eliminating testing programs for elite schools and dismantling gifted programs, all to cover their team’s decades of failure in educating poor and minority children.
What the woke are trying to do to the culture, the greens are trying to do to the economy. In mere months, we went from energy independence to begging OPEC to pump more oil. We are shutting down power plants on the vague hope that enough wind, solar, and storage will miracle themselves into existence before the rolling blackouts begin. We are suffering a massive shipping bottleneck in the Southern California ports in part because California’s “greening” requirements for big rigs have created a dearth of vehicles to haul containers. Sharp increases in energy prices appear to be a feature and goal of the greens’ machinations, as they try to money us into compliance with their foolhardy decarbonization. Meanwhile, China plans to keep increasing her carbon emissions for years to come.
The same China caught our Best-and-Brightest by surprise with its announcement of hypersonic suborbital nuclear-capable weapon delivery systems. Meanwhile, our three- and four-star generals are more interested in teaching our troops diversity than in preparing them for actually defending the country. And, it’s not like they’re overworked – our armed forces are top-heavy with general and flag officers.
As if raising our energy prices by eliminating all the cheap sources isn’t enough for them, they’re all-in on printing incomprehensible sums of new money, so they can do much more of what they do so poorly. While Joe Biden laughably claims that his $3.5T plan won’t cost a cent (what he means is that he’s planning to take money from ‘other people,’ not ‘you’), the reality is that their tax-and-spend plans are going to take massive amounts of capital away from the people who create jobs and foster innovation, so that the people who went bankrupt running a gambling monopoly can spend it on… well, who even knows what’s in that pork-monster? Quick as you can say “Milton Friedman,” the inflation monster is sucking buying power out of American’s pockets – even as the shelves from which they buy lay bare (part 2 of the shipping bottleneck are antiquated union rules and a failure to automate as the rest of the world has, and part 3 of that bottleneck is California’s anti-gig-economy law, which has reduced the number of available truckers beyond the green law’s effect).
Meanwhile, over in the UK, a conservative member of Parliament, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death by a known Islamic terrorist, but everyone’s scared shitless about calling it what it is: an act of terrorism. People correctly fear that the cultural arbiters will turn their wrath on them, rather than the terrorist-murderer, because it’s been decided that muslims are an “oppressed” group and therefore not a one can be denounced, lest it reflect poorly on the rest.
On top of all that, the adminstration has told the world that our southern border is now a fiction, come on in. It’s flying border-crossers all over the country in the middle of the night, perhaps to afford reporters have fewer opportunities to take incriminating pictures. Already, 1.7 million border crossers have been apprehended. But no one’s telling us what they did with them.
What they don’t talk about, isn’t happening, it seems. Especially when they figure all these migrants will eventually become Democratic voters.
Parents who protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory (aka The New Racism) to their children are being referred to the FBI for investigation for “domestic terrorism.”
Dr. Fauci lied, lied, condescended, and lied about the NIH funding gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan lab – under oath. If they actually bust him for lying under oath, I’ll eat my hat.
Jen Psaki is dismissing the supply chain problems – problems that Biden could solve in the blink of an eye by overriding the unions’ constrictive rules via EO – by snarkily noting that people might have to wait an extra day or two for their treadmills.
Crowds at sporting events – NASCAR, college football, Fenway Park – are chanting “Fuck Joe Biden!” Rather than report this, one NBC reporter (Kelli Stavast) at Talladega informed her viewers that they were chanting “Let’s Go Brandon!” She was interviewing driver Brandon Brown at the time, and whether she genuinely misheard or willfully spun is something we will likely never know.
No matter. Her assertion, emblematic of the modern mainstream press’s alliance with the Left and the Democratic Party, has gone viral. “Let’s Go Brandon” is now the rallying cry for all those who understand that Biden and the Democrats are destroying the nation. Merchandise has flooded the market.
More and more people are standing up to the woke-left bullies. Dave Chappelle’s recent comedy special on Netflix was declared transphobic by a handful of better-than-thou virtue signalers, but the Netflix brass refused to cave to that heckler’s veto. Liberals – true liberals, not the authoritarian leftists that pass themselves off as such – are realizing the totalitarian aspect of the woke movement, and increasingly rejecting it. Parents are taking their kids out of public schools, because those schools have abandoned teaching the three Rs in favor of cultural indoctrination.
I guessed, after the Dems improbably won both Georgia Senate seats (gee, thanks, Donald. All you had to do is shut up), that they’d shoehorn as much of their agenda into Biden’s first two years, no matter how unpopular, and rely on the gridlock that’d follow their likely loss of the House in the mid-terms to cement that agenda into eternity. After all, the hardest creature to kill in all creation is an on-going government program.
Why they’d cram such a transformational change on the American public, when it’s abundantly clear that it’s favored by only a minority, tells us who’s setting the agenda. The leftists are drowning out the moderates, and but for a couple Senators who see the doom that will befall both their party and the nation should the leftists get their way, they’d have already succeeded.
The progressives have shifted the Overton Window. Shifted, not expanded, mind you. The Right’s reaction to the Left’s excesses has been a move toward populism rather than traditional small-government conservatism. Thus, both the left and right Overton boundaries have moved left, much to the dismay of those of us who still believe in small government and individual liberty.
That which has shifted can always shift back, of course, which is why I haven’t simply thrown my hands up in despair. I also see hope in both the increasing rejection of “woke” by liberals, and in its commoditization by Big Business. Want to destroy a cultural trend? Give it to the suits. They’ll milk it for all it’s worth, and in doing so make it as uncool as Urkel’s pants.
I have to hope that the body politic rejects the woke-thugs. The alternative is the end of the American Experiment in favor of cultural totalitarianism, economic fascism, and the end of both freedom and prosperity.
We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.
We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them — they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
How then shall we perform it? — At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. — Abraham Lincoln, “Lyceum Address,” January, 1838
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Thanks as always, Peter. I was going to write a concurrence, but realized I have an impending tee time. Spot on, and it IS frustrating. Best regards, ds