Category: Social Commentary
The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

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If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

“In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Lessons unlearned

Lessons unlearned

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By now the world knows what happened on October 7 in Israel. The gruesome details and the jarring, terrible images have been broadcast on television and across the Internet worldwide. It is not my purpose to repeat those here. Rather, my intent is to focus on the human toll and to look at what brought us to this catastrophic place.

To trace the roots of what led to the events of the 7th we need to look back to the Obama administration and its appeasement of Iran and the forces in the Middle East that are supported, trained, and funded by Iran. For anyone who has been tracking things over the years what is happening now is, at best, only mildly surprising.

It’s important to understand that the current crowd in the White House are, for the most part, Obama administration recycles. No one with even minimal powers of observation believes Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge or calling the shots. It is the ideological bent of the people on the President’s security team that leads them to believe that appeasement of Iran and downgrading of relations with Israel results in peace in the Middle East when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. What is currently under way is visible proof of the error of this belief system, but their ideology and misguided understanding of Middle East dynamics prevents them from choosing another course. And now they’ve led us into the very mouth of the beast and how things will shake out, not ruling out a globally catastrophic result and one that almost certainly will come to do damage at home both in America and Europe, is very much unknown at this point.

I warned of the dangers of this approach of appeasement going back years before I started this blog. On Sept. 12, 2012, during Obama’s first term, I published The Trap Into Which We’ve Been Led. The dangers of appeasement were evident even then, in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, though they’re obvious to anyone who has studied or is conversant with the history of appeasement in world affairs. And then on Aug. 14, 2014, in the middle of Obama’s second term, I published Let Them Eat Hamburgers, describing the aloof and uncaring attitude Obama and his team displayed at that time in the face of the cruelty being inflicted on the Yazidis. Most of that piece could be written today, simply substituting Biden for Obama. In the face of the barbaric attack inflicted on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden waited Saturday until it already was late night and the end of a day of terror in Israel, to make a pathetic three-minute statement. And then Sunday he was silent, hosting a barbecue — at which they certainly ate hamburgers — on the White House lawn, and on Monday he took a holiday as the carnage continued both in Israel and in Gaza. It took him until Tuesday, three days after the barbarity had commenced and more than two hours later than scheduled, to stumble his way through a speech ostensibly supportive of Israel but without a single mention of the power behind Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I know most people don’t click on the links in my pieces, but I strongly urge you to click on those and the ones that follow and read the linked pieces. You will gain greater understanding of how all these things tie together.

Funding Iran’s Support of Terrorism

Much has been made, as it should be, of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that the Biden administration has unfrozen, part of a deal to exchange five Americans held by the Iranians for five Iranians in U.S. custody. Given that this is just the latest in a string of disproportionate concessions this administration made in exchange for Americans held by other countries, so much for the long-standing principle that we don’t pay ransoms to free people held hostage. The most predictable result, of course, is that such payments just encourage more hostage taking. But the other result, in this case, is that it frees up funds for Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, to support more terrorism. Such as what is going on in Israel right now. Never mind the blather coming out of the administration that Iran isn’t allowed to use the funds for other than humanitarian purposes. It frees up $6 billion for the Tehran regime to spend on its extraterritorial adventurism.

Regardless the argument over the $6 billion, it’s chump change compared with the other funds this administration and the Obama administration handed to the Iranians, no strings attached. In my piece Dancing With the Devil posted in March of last year, I noted this as an adjunct to Biden taking America’s energy independence, as fostered by Donald Trump, to going hat-in-hand to some of the worst actors on earth to once more meet our energy needs after restraining domestic oil production:

“But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

“All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.”

In the intervening time, the Biden administration’s decision to ignore the sanctions Trump imposed on Iran allowed the terrorist state to sell its oil to the Chinese and elsewhere, yielding at least another $60 billion to Tehran. The country’s foreign currency reserves, which the Trump sanctions had dropped to just $4 billion in 2020 from $122.5 billion in 2018, had recovered to $41 billion in 2022 and could be as high as $100 billion now. Good work, Joe.

Proving the Naysayers Wrong

While Biden and Obama courted the mullahs of Tehran in the misguided belief that they could be dissuaded in their quest for a nuclear bomb and somehow act as a responsible nation among nations, Trump understood the reality and pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He understood well how peace is achieved through strength, not shows of weakness, and when he took out Iran’s chief architect of terrorism, Qasam Soleimani, in January 2020, the naysayers and handwringers predicting dire consequences were definitively proven wrong. That was then and this is now, and Tehran, like the Russians and Chinese, sees the weakness in Washington, drawing a direct line from our shameful surrender from Afghanistan under Biden’s hand, and the three feel free to exert the bellicose power they had restrained during the Trump years, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or — holding our collective breath — Taiwan.

Commenting on what precipitated the carnage in Israel, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump during the Soleimani affair, succinctly stated the reality: “What has created war here is American weakness, American appeasement.” To prove Pompeo’s point, we now have a State Department that called for restraint on the part of Israel, whose citizens were being slaughtered on a scale, proportionately, mutliple times greater than 9-11, before being forced to retract the statement.

Instead of the clarity that came of projecting American strength in the interest of world peace and stability, we have an administration that, for all intents and purposes, has lost its mind. We have an open border policy that — by design — has allowed something like 7 million illegal immigrants into the country with little to no idea who they are. Agents so far, in the three years of the Biden debacle, have identified 264 individuals on the terrorist watch list — by far a new record — but have no idea how many terrorists were among the 1.5 million “gotaways” — the ones who just snuck across the border without apprehension. It would be beyond Pollyannish to believe hard-core terrorists were not among them, intent on setting up sleeper cells in the country, waiting for instructions to strike. Even with its tighter border controls, the same is true in Europe, and elsewhere. Terrorism doesn’t just exist in some far-off land, something we watch on television. It exists among us, too.

Hearing representatives of this administration one can be excused for thinking one is watching an episode of Saturday Night Live rather than the performance of serious public servants. Tracking the moronic statements of their boss, we have once honorable people like Admiral John Kirby, NSA spokesperson, saying with obvious seriousness that global warming and a 1.5-degree gain in global temperature would be a worse outcome for the human race than nuclear war, or that white supremacy is a greater danger to the country than terrorism. Baghdad Bob has metastasized across Washington and we all have to fear for our very survival in the face of such institutional delusion.

Before I entered the Foreign Service in 1988 I made an agreement with myself. I decided that I’d stay in the Service as long as it felt right. But if it stopped feeling right, or if I was asked to do something I had serious qualms of conscience about, I’d resign. I pretty much followed that compact with myself when, in 1999, I drafted my resignation letter to then SecState Madeleine Albright. One wonders how much their pay check or title means to people like Kirby to so debase themselves before the public they are charged with serving that they prattle such nonsense and not tender their resignation. Whatever their motivation, it is clear that no lessons have been learned by this administration and the future, not just of Israel or the Middle East, but America and, indeed, all the world, lies in serious jeopardy.

Featured Image: Women kidnapped by Hamas, Israel War Room via NDTV. Used under Fair Use.

Noa Argamani kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Avi Nathan, boyfriend of Noa Argamani, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Bodies of 260-some people murdered by Hamas terrorists at music festival, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Don’t believe your lying eyes

Don’t believe your lying eyes

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Don’t believe your lying eyes. That’s the message from this bungling and utterly dishonest administration. And from the lying and corrupt State Media that allow them to try to pull the wool over the country’s eyes.

Bidenomics — the misguided but unintentionally descriptive term for Biden’s disastrous economic policies — are working just fine. Don’t believe your lying eyes that tell you something rather different whenever you check out at the grocery store or gas station.

The border is secure. Never mind that new records of illegal border crossers are broken on a nearly daily basis now and illegals are creating true crises for blue cities, from New York and Boston to Chicago and L.A. Pay no attention to hordes of illegals walking across our alleged border and camping out on a sidewalk near you. Or those 100,000+ Americans killed by Fentanyl carried across the Southwest Border or the 82,000 children “lost” by this administration. Don’t believe your lying eyes! The border is secure and everything is just fine!

Crime isn’t on the rise. The statistics say otherwise, as do the experiences of ordinary people in virtually every city of any size. But don’t believe your lying eyes. If there is more crime it’s undoubtedly the Republicans’ fault and, besides, those criminals are probably just hungry.

The president is fit as a fiddle, right on top of his game. Ignore that his stumbles, verbal, mental, and physical, have been happening with such alarming regularity that White House staffers are charged with overriding his impromptu policy statements and keeping him from falling since his competency to serve as President is seen as just one fall away from serious challenge. Don’t believe your lying eyes (or ears, either, in this case).

The “Big Guy” didn’t profit from his son Hunter’s overseas business imbroglios. All that money didn’t get to him in any way and didn’t influence his actions as an alleged “public servant.” Don’t believe your lying eyes! Or what your brain tells you (oh, you have a brain? Turn it off immediately! No logic or thinking is allowed!)

Biden didn’t retain pallets of classified documents from when he was a senator and vice president and had no right to them. No! Look away! It’s Trump who is your culprit, not Biden! Those papers were all safe there in that unlocked garage with his Corvette and Hunter. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Of course we have a system of equal justice. The administration would never think to skew things its way nor persecute the president’s main opposition candidate. The horror of the very thought! We rend our garments! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Our respect on the international stage has returned. Don’t for a moment believe that other heads of state, friend and foe alike, have noticed the bungling senile fool that serves as our head of state and haven’t taken note of his mental and physical debasement. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

And perhaps the most glaring and critically important thing of all: Clearly the president is in charge of everything and it’s not true that he is just a figurehead for a ruling junta, where the real power resides and is exercised. No, no! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

The term for this process is gaslighting, one of the Left’s pet terms they like to level against the Right. It’s hard to imagine more blatant examples of the process, defined by Merriam-Webster as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes!

The Emperor has no clothes

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to compare the current state of affairs in modern-day America to Hans Christian Andersen’s Nineteenth Century folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But these are cliche times in which we live and few comparisons apply as well to them as Andersen’s 1837 parable. Sadly, we lack that astute child who noticed that the emperor had, not a resplendent new suit, but no clothes on at all.

I don’t know if it’s unique to America to have political charlatans masquerading as medical or psychological doctors, but the other day I heard one such charlatan wax enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s great condition and how fit he has kept himself. This about the guy who falls off his bike, repeatedly falls up stairs going on Air Force One, and can barely move his flimsy little lawn chair on the beach where he goes to fill the 40% of his term that he’s spent on vacation. Meanwhile, this same Dr. Charlatan had the temerity to call Donald Trump “a heart attack waiting to happen.” Now I’m not prepared to predict who might or might not have a heart attack — it’s a pretty imprecise science, as far as I can tell. But I do have a set of still fairly good eyes and a functioning brain that tells me, were I to put my money on who was more physically and mentally capable and astute, Biden or Trump, I wouldn’t move my chips to Biden’s spot on the board. Sorry, but I will believe my lying eyes!

On the border, I recently saw a leading member of the State Media try to shut down a guest who had been to the Southwest Border and saw with his own eyes how it’s wide open by insisting — in verbatim lockstep with the liar at the White House’s podium — “the border is secure.” The smirk on the face of the interviewee was priceless. Like me, he was willing to believe his lying eyes, even in the face of derision from the State Media spouting the official and 100% false administration line. And then I heard another minion of the State Media explaining how your dollar is going further now than it was a year or two ago. Whether she is a shameless liar or a total moron lacking in any knowledge of basic economics with no understanding of inflation, how does such a person get through J-school, let alone get hired by a major media company? And how many of her viewers buy into the nonsense she peddles? Hopefully they’re believing their lying eyes.

A little bit of background is called for. While the examples cited here don’t arise directly from members of the White House Press Corps, that’s where the official party line from the administration begins and then propagates through the system. When I was a practicing journalist my colleagues and I largely saw the White House Press Corps as a band of journalistic whores (actual word we used). That was nearly four decades ago, and compared to the current White House Press Corps, its members in those days would be nuns or monks in relation to today’s travesties. Daily White House Press Babler KJP stands before the corps and tells the most bald-faced and easily disproven lies and, with a couple of exceptions, the whores in the corps of alleged journalists nod their heads, take their notes, and go forth, with their colleagues, to lie to the American public. This is what passes for journalism in contemporary America. And you’re not supposed to believe your lying eyes?

Twisted up in their own petards

I’m not sure what a petard is, but I have to admit it’s becoming increasingly amusing to watch as those in the State Media who, for the past three years, carried water for the Biden fabrication machine and crime family suddenly to become unsure of what their mandate is. This confusion has arisen as Dem power brokers, to whom the State Media are largely beholden, begin to express their doubts about whether Jell-O Joe is capable of a second term. Never mind that most of us didn’t think he was capable of a first term, the issue now has become the potential second term and whether he’ll finish his first term.

One recent poll showed that 72% of Americans, including 79% of independents and 48% of Democrats, don’t want him to run again. Some polls have shown as many as 75% of Democratic and Dem-leaning voters don’t want Jell-O Joe to run again. Apparently more people are believing their lying eyes and the State Media is in a quandary how to deal with that inconvenient fact.

As I’ve opined before, and will continue to since it’s the absolute 1,000% truth, the real threat to American democracy lies not within the government nor any given administration nor even within any insidious social or political movements, but with the lack of a free, fair, and unbiased news media. As I recently said, repeating sentiments frequently expressed over the years, “What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.”

So now that the cat is out of the bag, anyone with two functioning eyes, or two functioning ears, combined with one functioning brain and the willingness to look beyond the official party line, can see that Joe Biden is incapable of being president. The quandary now for Dem power brokers, deep-state actors, and their media client sycophants, has become who will replace him on the ticket. This is largely an existential question for them since they are looking down the barrel of a deeply embittered Donald Trump, currently beating Biden in the polls by as much as 9 points, who is determined to finally and definitely clean out that swamp that Washington and the federal establishment has become. And even in the highly unlikely event that Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, the other leading candidates on that side of the divide also have strong inducement to do the same.

Faced with an opposition party with a deep bench of qualified candidates, the Dems have a dearth of possibilities that could effectively fill the seat. They also have to deal with the Kamala Problem, what to do about the vice president who was put in as a poison pill to keep Biden from being removed from office and who has proven to be even more unpopular than her boss. Can she be bypassed without raising a storm among the Democratic Party’s various constituencies in its divide-and-rule strategy based on racial and sexual politics?

The party, I’m quite sure, would have no issue with another figurehead candidate while pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. But are voters willing to accept another such sham and insult to democracy? Already the Dems are rolling out their dirty tricks to make another go at stealing the 2024 election if they can’t win it through fair and legal means, and their hope is that voters won’t believe their lying eyes for another 12 or so months, when early voting begins.

Don’t be one of those gaslit voters. No matter what anyone tells you, believe your lying eyes. There is plenty there to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Featured Image: Eyes, Noelle Otto, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Retina: Basila Vlad, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Iris: v2osk, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

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In this early lead up to the 2024 presidential election we hear a lot about the role that independent voters will play in the outcome. According to some analysis, independents — voters who are not adherents of either of the two major parties — will likely determine the outcome of the election. There also could be a major impact that results from a determined third-party movement, itself formed by candidates and voters disaffected with the two-party system. But the question I ask is the same one I raised 13 years ago, in the second year of Barack Obama’s first term: Is there really such a thing as a truly independent voter?

I am putting up now the piece I wrote then to look into this question. While there have been some significant shifts on the national electoral scene — substitute, for instance, “Maga Republicans,” Joe Biden’s derisive and divisive term of artifice for adherents to Donald Trump’s version of electoral independence, for the Tea Party movement of 2010 — I think the overall question remains a legitimate one. I offered a possible way forward in my original piece. I still think the approach presented then might still be a viable one, though I’m somewhat more skeptical today that a sufficient number of voters could coalesce around the tenets I posit as the “LCD” principles that could bring most independents together.

While actual party registrations, in states that allow voter registration by party, don’t necessarily reflect it, surveys of voters show an ever greater trend toward those who see themselves as independent — 49% versus roughly 25% who identify either as Democratic or Republican — and so that key element of my initial piece remains valid, if only more so.

Read the piece and draw your own conclusions. I’d be interested in knowing readers’ views on the question.

Originally published on May 3, 2010

In America today the largest group of registered voters is neither Democratic nor Republican. It is independent – no party affiliation. It is how I have been registered my entire voting life.

Independents form the plurality – plurality, not majority – of voters in this country today. That would appear to give independents huge political power and a force in their own right to be reckoned with.

To some extent, that is what we have seen, whether in the power of independents to elect Barack Obama President, or their power to defeat Obama candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently, Massachusetts. They have held the “swing” power, and are likely to hold it in the mid-term elections in November and very possibly in the next presidential election in 2012.

Some of the biggest proponents and promoters of this trend, such as economic and political commentator Lou Dobbs, author of the book “Independents Day,” see it as the future wave in American politics. And to some extent, Dobbs and others of like mind are right. But there are serious flaws and limitations to this theory and to the real long-term effect of the independent force in America.

The main flaw and limitation has to do with the source and driving motivation of these non-aligned voters. Many – perhaps most – are just disenchanted with and disabused of both the major political parties. Some are fed up with the state of American politics in general. Some just have not decided to pick a party (and in some states this allows them to pick which party primary in which to vote), some just want to keep their options open while still being mostly inclined to vote for one of the major parties. Or, as in my case, remaining unrecorded with any party enables us to maintain an appearance of being truly independent and unaligned, as much as the reality of our actual voting patterns might indicate otherwise.

Now this is where the theory of the independent movement is flawed and ultimately breaks down, and why I call it a myth. It is because the motivation of the independent voter is so varied and, in fact, is neither monolithic nor ideologically driven. Some have come out of the Left, believing the Democratic Party has not gone far enough in pursuing a leftist-liberal agenda, as well as others who believe it has become too liberal. Others have come out of the Republican Party, believing the G.O.P. has lost its way, has become too liberal or, for others, too conservative. And there are others – perhaps the truest of independents – who despair of both parties and the very political process and system and who want to see an overhaul of the process.

Given this diversity of origin and opinion and, ultimately, objective, this is where the theory of the power of the independent all comes unglued. Independent voters may help vote in an Obama or vote out a Corzine, but they are like an unruly herd of buffalo galloping back and forth between the fence lines of the political pasture. On closer examination, there is no given trend or makeup, whether political or ideological, to this vast herd of independents. And this is a key reason why there is no, nor can there be, any viable “Independent Party.” If we consider the two major parties fractured, so much more so would be this mythical “Independent Party.”

What we have seen are movements – or more precisely, one movement in particular – emerge from this larger movement (trend would be more accurate), and that is the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party adherents clearly derive from a range of more mainstream political views, the bulk one can say are from the right-of-center persuasion, primarily the Republican Party. And this is the issue, that there is no one center of political thought around which independents might gravitate.

Were the Tea Party movement, for instance, to congeal into a Tea Party Party, it almost certainly would be doomed to fail and, in effect, would in most cases likely serve to elect those liberal left-of-center candidates the Tea Party people would most like to unseat. No, with all due respect to Lou Dobbs and his persuasion, the independent trend as it currently stands is not a viable political force and, as such, is a myth.

That said, there may be one way and one way only to move this independent trend (I resist calling it a movement) forward into a viable and cohesive political force. And that is to distill and draw upon the points of the LCD – Least Common Denominator. Not in the pejorative sense of that term, but in the sense of getting to the very basics upon which most independents either already base their independence or to which they can be drawn.

Admittedly this is open to some argument, discussion, even disagreement, but the two that I would propose as most basic core values and to which the greatest number of independents of all origins might be drawn are adherence to Constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility. I believe that for a majority of those who now consider themselves independent, these two values are those they can most likely get behind. There might be some wiggle room in how these principles are interpreted, or how strictly they might be adhered to, but I think these are the LCD core values that would form the basis of any viable independent movement that might lead to significant electoral victories.

This would not be a third party, which I think the facts still indicate would not be viable in America, but rather would represent a shift in voting patterns that would elect candidates, regardless of party affiliation or ideology, who at least adhere to the two LCD core values.

Eventually this would result in profound and ostensibly lasting changes in the two major parties. Though what is truly needed, in the words of educational philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is a state of continual revolt and not revolution which, in the end, just returns things to where they started. With this pressure of the independents and their insistence on adherence to the two core principles, we might then expect to see a real paradigm shift in the politics of this country and perhaps – though it is a lot to expect – a diminution of the political polarization we now see.

Ideally the two core principles might be expanded on with two additional principles – those of individual responsibility and limited government – but then one risks losing some of the adherents who can agree on the two most basic core values. These added values, however, might draw in those independents who, like me, are of a more libertarian bent. It is when things are pushed into the realm of social legislation – a range of issues that include anything from lifestyle choices to abortion – that cohesion again begins to break down. But here adherence to Constitutional principles might limit the push for such social legislation and hold things together.

In other words, you might not approve of some of my lifestyle choices any more than I might approve of yours, but the Constitution, notably the First Amendment, gives us both the right to believe and act as we wish provided we do no harm to anyone else. My desire to reach out my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Even such a recognition would mark a major step forward from where we are now with polarization of the political dialogue and everyone trying to run everyone else’s life.

Featured Image: Cutting an Independent Path, Stephen Leonardi, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Different Folks, Different Votes: Cotton Bro Studio, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Read my other essays and commentaries on this site.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

Summer Solstice
Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

Back at That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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It has become an annual ritual, on the Summer Solstice, that I repost this piece. It initially appeared six years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. I originally posted the piece on this blog, and subsequently it became an annual event to post it each year on June 21. Three years ago I began posting it on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. It now appears on both blogs and on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Today, June 21, 2023, it is once more the Summer Solstice, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 10:58 a.m. EDT/02:58 p.m. UTC. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were six years ago, when the post first appeared. It’s been five years since I lived on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 54 years, well more than half a century, since my father’s death, and Sunday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I hope you enjoy the piece. And play the music at the end.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.