Tag Archives: liberalism

Current Events

Critical Race Theory

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A very well written piece, albeit there are some words the left may need a dictionary to understand what he saying. LOL. A mostly retired trial lawyer who began as a Marine JAG Officer 1975-1982.

He poses a great question we all should be asking today, and does a great job answering it. Worth the read! Thank you Michael for sending it to me.

“What is wrong with critical race theory?”

Once the exclusive domain of deep thinking university professors, critical race theory became a part of our national conversation when the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop conducting workplace training based on critical race theory and opened an inquiry into the City of Seattle’s use of it.  The training is in fact political indoctrination and the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.

Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany.  In 1848 Karl Marx had introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and Capital that working class laborers were oppressed by those in power, the owners of capital. He argued for class consciousness, and in advocating radical change, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains.  The dilemma facing the Frankfurt School scholars was why after the Russian Revolution and the wide dissemination of Marx’s invitation to a workers’ paradise was it not being realized?  Industrial organization and mass communications seemed to divert the oppressed workers from their liberation.  Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School is credited with arguing a theory is “critical” if it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and critical theory was applied to interrogate how power was used to perpetuate oppression.

Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s as critical legal studies.  Critical legal studies looked at our laws with the assumption that law oppresses people, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law.  Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was an example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression.  Denying women the right to vote and prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was an example of the use of law to perpetuate gender oppression.

Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, Wyoming before that, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948.  Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists concluded that the power of the oppressors was  embedded in our political structures and infects our laws today to perpetuate bias and discrimination against minorities and other marginalized communities.  As Samuel Gregg puts it in “Liberalism’s Civilization Problem,” Law and Liberty, September 7, 2020, the left’s “insistence that most of the West’s achievements are primarily masks for endless oppression largely flows from the left’s generally negative view of Western civilization” (emphasis mine).  In this dystopia there is no arc of justice, instead, US history is irredeemably rotten to the core.

Critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is the only appropriate frame of reference for a discussion of race.  Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of racial bias against the Irish, Italian, Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white.  Starting with this assumed racial binary, the critical theorists contend racial bias is embedded not only in our laws, but also our language, media, political structures and culture, and they set out to look for it.  Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rediscovered what Stokely Carmichael described as “institutional racism” in his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.

It’s called systemic racism today, and its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all.  Indeed, denial of bias is strong proof one is in fact sick with bias.  This demand to override a person’s reluctance to accept the fact that she is in fact racially biased is one of the most pernicious and dangerous features of critical race theory.  These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes.  And the unrepentant ominously resemble dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Trump administration’s recent Executive Order and inquiry into Seattle’s work place training alleges that only White employees are required to admit to and denounce their racist impulses.  At first blush the required training appears to violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race.

Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words people speak, two fundamental issues should make us wary of the growth of this ideology.  First, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and legislators.  Robin Diangelo is a White academic whose popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so.

White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that in the end further impoverished Black communities.  So much so that White men led by President Bill Clinton and then Senator Joe Biden legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community.  The reform ended “welfare as we know it” as Clinton put it and incarcerated large numbers of Black men, “super-predators” who needed to be brought to heel as Ms. Clinton put it to an all White audience in New Hampshire.  White folks telling Black folks what they need is a not so subtle form of oppression. White folks telling White folks what they shouldn’t think or say is almost as bad.  Isn’t it time for White folk to stop telling Black folk what they need?

Second, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease and need help regardless of who they are or where they grew up.  In Diangelos’ world there are no individuals, no person is unique; instead, as a “race” we produce and reproduce racism in lockstep in every aspect of our daily lives whether we know it or not.  All notions of freedom are illusory.  The chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption.

It is by definition a racist ideology, it divides our communities, and gives cover to those who want to destroy our history and institutions.  No leap of imagination is required to draw a direct line from the claim that systemic racism infects our institutions and must be pulled out by its roots to the destruction of civic monuments, attacks on the police, looting of stores and burning buildings in our cities today.

As Galatians 6:7 taught us, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Michael J. Bond
Copyright 2020

Postscript: I’ll be off the net for a week, going fishing. Need a break. Meanwhile,let’s all pray for President Trump and his bride!!!

Originally posted 2020-10-03 15:51:40.

Current Events

“Texas Reloaded”

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Sorry folks, I know I have already posted for the day and said I was going to skip the BS rhetoric coming from the far left. But this just came in and have to post it. There was a rather large amount of verbiage along with the video, but the sender advised me to skip the text and just watch the video, so I have done that here. Great political ad by a bunch of HEROES!. Click and enjoy.

 

Originally posted 2020-09-26 13:01:50.

Recent Posts

The New “Protestors”

Another great post on Andy’s  blog: “Colonel of Truth.” A friend and fellow Marine has a way with words. The New Protestors!

Copy and paste

https://acoloneloftruth.blogspot.com/2020/09/trumps-ruthless-protestors-rock-north.html

Originally posted 2020-09-22 10:56:57.

Current Events

Another Shot Across the Bow

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for sleepy Joe from one of my FAVS, Victor Davis Hanson.

Biden, ‘The Great and Powerful’

For now Joe Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the projection.

 

Victor Davis HansonSeptember 13, 2020

Media bias is not new.

In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?

Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?

Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”

Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.

The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.

But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.

Bunker Illusions

For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.

Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.

The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”

Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.

When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.

So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.

But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.

When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.

Yet even then Biden cannot act out the part of the Star Trek federation’s addled Gill without someone either giving him the prewritten answer on the teleprompter or writing it out for him in real-time. Sometimes if Biden is not reading a hidden teleprompter script, he looks down in panic for notes or his smartphone instructions in ways that only expose the sheer ridiculousness of this faux media-staged event.

Sometimes he shows off family pictures on screen that seemingly inadvertently reflect and expose the ghostly presence of a teleprompter’s reflection in the background. On other occasions when speaking, Biden searches in vain for his “schedule” and asks handlers to fetch it, whatever that exactly means.

In a presidential campaign first, Biden even reads out the written directives of his controllers as if to say “I’m not really saying this myself, but so what?”

So not surprisingly, during one of these sessions, out came a reference to his script’s talking point “topline” headings. When faking impromptu answers, Biden bumps into and voices his handlers’ notation of “end of quotation.”

Occasionally a “citizen” questioner sort of rebels from the media Borg and asks an unapproved question (e.g. “I’m just going to be honest Mr. Biden, I was told to go off this paper, but I can’t. We need the truth and I am a part of the truth”). In reaction, Biden’s handlers and fact-checkers rush to assure the public that the approved question was written by the questioner’s sympathetic organization rather than from Team Biden itself—as if we are supposed to believe the campaign had no idea what its own surrogates would ask.

Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.

But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.

Oz Wizardry

As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.

In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.

True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.

But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.

The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.

For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.

Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.

Given all that, the decision of his campaign and their media stand-ins to reinsert Biden into his safe space, wheel him out for scripted occasions, and pray at least that he can follow either the teleprompter, his iPhone, or written notes in his lap, or remember his cues—without including the prompts themselves—seems understandable.

This was all known to Democratic primary voters who initially wanted little to do with Biden. The narratives advanced by primary rivals Kamala Harris and Corey Booker implied that he was either a virtual racist or cognitively challenged or both—insinuations the left-wing media was willing to fuel, in the heydays of a preferable Berrnie Sanders, Elizbeth Warren, or Beto O’Rourke prairie fire candidacy.

All that media fantasy imploded when would-be savior Michael Bloomberg proved little more than a billionaire bore and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders cranky and shrill socialist septuagenarians with even scarier agendas.

Floating to November

So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.

But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas.

Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania.

The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective.

And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line.

The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.

Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out.

Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work?

So far the rope-a-dope has succeeded in slowing down somewhat the pace of the erosion of Biden’s lead. And Biden as the tough-talking Wizard projection will continue until, when, or if the polls show an undeniable Trump surge ahead.

For now Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the

Originally posted 2020-09-17 11:31:04.

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Cultural Suicide Is Painless

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For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:

“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”

For someone born, raised, and educated  in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.

By  • 

n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed

We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.

The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”

A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.

Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.

Tribalism Rising

To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.

Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”

When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”

The Self-Immolation of Pro Sports

Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.

But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.

The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.

But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.

Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.

Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.

Institutional Crack-Ups

Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.

Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?

Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.

No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.

After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.

Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.

To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.

So it has begun to seem this endless summer.

My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.

Originally posted 2020-09-01 10:33:27.