May God Bless America Again!

November 19, 2022

The Sort of Red Wave We Got

By William Manning at American Thinker:

On November 8, Republicans were dreaming of catching a red wave that would carry them to victory.  The next day, Democrats snickered at the faint red stream trickling by.  After putting away their surfboards, Republicans scratched their heads in wonder.  Democrats had botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, encouraged inflation with excessive spending, implemented an egregious energy policy, rarely encountered a criminal they wouldn’t coddle, and supported the proliferation of wokeism.  Republicans believed they were dealt a winning hand and were anxious to cash in by flipping blue seats to red.  When the players laid down their hands, there were precious few chips to rake in.  What happened?

The media conduct opinion polls to inform the public.  Opinion polls “are an assessment of public opinion obtained by questioning a representative sample.”  These polls are also used by the media to generate interest and fuel their narrative.  It is up to consumers to determine whether the information they are ingesting is relevant to ongoing events or entertainment produced to increase ratings and advertising revenue for media outlets.  The media were happy to push the red wave narrative to keep consumers engaged.  Surfboard sales skyrocketed.

The last RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average projected a pickup of three Senate seats for Republicans.  RCP picked Masters in Arizona (0.3% lead in the last poll), Laxalt in Nevada (3.4% lead), and Walker in Georgia (1.4% lead) to flip Democrat seats.  Walker may still win his seat in a runoff, but the other two candidates lost.  RCP also picked Oz to win the Senate seat in Pennsylvania.  Oz was up 0.4% in the last poll.  Excepting Laxalt, these candidates were within the polls’ margin of error.  To pick them all was risky.  It is likely that employees of RCP were expecting these candidates to ride a red wave to victory because the polls were a little sketchy. 

RCP predictions in the House races were reasonably close.  The site predicted a Republican majority of 227 seats, a pickup of 15.  The generic congressional ballot gave the GOP a 2.5% advantage going into the election.  In 2020, Republicans held all their House seats while picking up 14, an unusually good year, considering that a Democrat won the presidential election.  After doing well in 2020, the expectation of significant House gains in 2022 was unreasonable.  Republicans received a 3% advantage in the national House vote this year, garnering 3.5 million more raw votes than Democrats.  This is a bit of a red wave.  

We’ve been informed by politicians and media pundits that candidate quality makes a difference in elections.  What a brilliant notion!  Articulate, charismatic candidates should enjoy an advantage over less talented opponents.  There are exceptions to this notion, which might be viewed as a paradox.  Sometimes the best candidate doesn’t win.

John Fetterman is the Democrat senator-elect from Pennsylvania.  His greatest asset may be the image he skillfully modeled after the beloved Addams Family character Uncle Fester.  His radical liberalism was softened by this carefully crafted persona.  Fetterman suffered a stroke during the summer, and as a result, lost his capacity to hear and understand language.  His attempts at public speaking were also impeded.

During a debate with Dr.  Mehmet Oz, he was unable to effectively engage.  Dr. Oz easily won the debate, but Oz received no noticeable bounce in the polls.   

While recovering from the stroke, Fetterman’s press releases painted Oz as a rich outsider from New Jersey.  This stuck to Oz like a bad hairpiece on an aging Hollywood star.  Pennsylvanians got behind their home boy.  In the end, Fetterman won easily. 

Was the winner the highest-quality candidate?  It depends on how you look at it.  Oz seemed better prepared to represent the people of Pennsylvania.  He is an intelligent, well educated person who effectively communicated the issues of the day.  A reasonable person would conclude he could better represent the interests of Pennsylvanians.  Fetterman’s victory is a paradox.  The candidate who possessed qualities voters should favor was rejected in favor of a stock character with no such qualities.

Ron DeSantis and Lee Zeldin were high-quality candidates.  Both Republicans ran for governor, in Florida and New York, respectively.  DeSantis won handily, while Zeldin lost in a competitive race.  DeSantis, who barely won election four years ago, seems to have made Florida a solidly Republican state.  Zeldin ran a good race in the Democrat stronghold of New York.  Florida and New York flipped four seats each from Democrat to Republican.  High-quality candidates make a difference. 

Democrats had some issues working in their favor.  After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Democrats circled the corpse of Roe like vultures.  They picked all the meat from the bones, then enshrined the skeleton on the steps of the Supreme Court.  Republicans had hoped to increase votes from suburban women.  Their hopes were diminished in the wake of the Roe decision.

Conservatives have worked for forty years to overturn Roe.  The laws of physics apply in politics; for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Reaction to the decision likely cost Republicans votes.  Roe was overturned, and Republicans won the House in the same year.  This should be recognized as success.   

The Jan. 6 Committee propaganda seems to have successfully indoctrinated many voters.  The Democrats’ allies in the media produced the hearings and delivered them like prime-time TV specials.  Many voters either watched the hearings or saw the highlight reels.  In the waning days of the campaign, Democrats advanced the supposition that Republicans are a threat to democracy.  Obama, Biden, the Clintons, and the usual suspects in the media advised voters that to save democracy, their ballots must be cast for Democrats.  The indoctrination was complete.  The message was delivered.  Many moderates rejected Republican candidates to save democracy and protect their abortion rights.

The biannual diatribe pitting Republicans against Social Security and Medicare once again hurt Republicans.  These programs are cornerstones of Democrat legacy and are the argument for the beatification of Franklin Roosevelt and his enshrinement on Mt. Rushmore.  Republicans made arguments about the solvency and management of these programs providing Democrats fodder for attack ads.  Democrats could use the money they gifted participants in the student loan program to fund Social Security and Medicare.  Republicans should demand that the trust funds be funded and forever remove this issue from Democrat election playbook.

Many Democrats believe that their legislative victories prevented the red wave.  Democrats took credit for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.  Most, if not all, of this legislation is dubious.  Maybe a few voters looked at this legislation as a magnificent accomplishment, but it’s doubtful that these new laws attracted Democrat voters.

Both parties had issues that favored their candidates.  One can argue that Democrats outmaneuvered Republicans, but it’s a fact that Republican candidates received 3.5 million more votes than their opponents and now control the House of Representatives.  A red wave suitable for surfing didn’t materialize, but the victory is something Republicans can build on.  They have much work to do.

(May God Bless America somewhere! ghr…)

Garland and Certain GOP Pessimists to WAR AGAINST President Trump?

NOVEMBER 18, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DONALD TRUMP, JOE BIDEN

DUELING INVESTIGATIONS

Scott noted earlier that Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to torment Donald Trump. Garland said, I assume with a straight face:

It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.

Indisputably! Right. Smith will be returning to Washington from The Hague, where he is “chief prosecutor for the special court.” That will be good training for his role as the Democratic Party’s agent in destroying Donald Trump. The Democrats have been planning on indicting Trump for a long time, and appointing a special counsel is part of their plan. It allows them to wash their hands of the investigation, pretending that impartial justice is simply taking its course.

For the record, Smith’s charge includes both the events of January 6, 2021, and the innocuous documents that Trump stashed in his Mar-a-Lago basement.

While obviously an act of political cynicism, the significance of this appointment should not be underestimated. I assume that Smith will be able to bring criminal charges against Trump in Washington, D.C., and it is almost a foregone conclusion that Trump will be convicted (of whatever the charges may be) by a hyperpartisan D.C. jury. In 2024, will Trump be the Republican nominee for president, or will he be trying to fight off a prison sentence? Or both?

Meanwhile, Republicans have trumpeted their intention to investigate the Biden family.

After winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans said on Thursday that investigating President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings will be their top oversight priority when they formally take power next year.

To their credit, Republicans have made it clear that they are investigating Joe Biden, not Hunter Biden. So while the Democrats are investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump, the Republicans will be investigating (but not impeaching) Joe Biden. I am not sanguine about how this will turn out.

While the ability of a special counsel to wreak havoc is well established, Congressional investigations tend to fizzle out. For one thing, Congressmen usually are not very good at it. For another, Congressional committees lack adequate investigatory powers and, for reasons I have never understood, are reluctant to use the powers they do have. Thus, instead of subpoenaing documents, Congressional committees request them. The responding party, usually a government agency, responds by producing whatever selected documents it deems advantageous to itself.

Or else the responding party ignores the committee entirely, like Eric Holder. Republicans who ignore Congressional committees, like Steve Bannon, might go to jail. Democrats who ignore Congressional committees, like Eric Holder, go on to multi-million dollar a year jobs in the establishment.

So I expect the dueling investigations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden to be a mismatch. The Trump investigation will likely result in an indictment and criminal conviction. The Biden investigation will tell us what we already know, and its findings will be a deep secret unless you read Power Line, InstaPundit, Breitbart, and other conservative news sources. Most news outlets will parrot the Democrat line that Biden’s corruption is a “long-debunked conspiracy theory.” It is all about poor, drug-addled–but now reformed!–Hunter Biden. And did you know that Joe’s other son died in Iraq?

Call me a pessimist, but that is how I see it playing out.

Will America Return To Teach TRUTH AND ENLIGHTENMENT OF LEARNING THE UNKNOWN?

Restoring the Authentic Enlightened University

How Americans can expunge the social fantasy and pseudoscience of antiracism from their universities.

By Stanley K. Ridgley at American Greatness:

November 17, 2022

Shedding an ideology is never easy, especially for true believers. This is the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in with Janus-faced antiracism and its enforcement arm of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” particularly on college campuses.

It’s a strange and dystopian doctrine, and if you have doubts about it, you’ll be glad to know that those doubts are well-founded. Here, you can take the first step along the road to DEI deprogramming and reacquire your critical faculties so necessary to surviving and thriving in a modern information-age society.

Here I refer to DEI as it is practiced and propagated in American universities.

“Doing the Work” as a Fellow Traveler?

You may have been exposed to DEI on your campus and, as a result, have become a quiescent “ally” or an active fellow traveler helping to perpetuate the scheme. Perhaps you fancy yourself “doing the work” of “antiracism,” particularly as your institution may have issued one of the garment-rending “racial justice” statements in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, even as no university in the nation had anything to do with that event and, at least as traditionally understood, universities remain the least-racist places in the country. Many folks go all-in on the diversity, equity, and inclusion project, not recognizing that DEI has a deceptive frontstage offering and a noxious backstage ideological reality.

This frontstage/backstage tactic is a reliable tool for the social justice lobby, especially in universities, which have uncritically embraced DEI and have installed racialist bureaucrats—psychologist Irving Janis called them “mindguards”—to administer the political orthodoxy. This is a classic example of what Janis identified as “groupthink,” in which skepticism and doubt about the orthodoxy are prohibited. Another term for frontstage DEI is the Potemkin village, a Russian term that refers to adding a freshly painted façade to buildings to mask the interior rot.

I surmise that you bit hard on the frontstage bait, much as cult recruits are seduced by a lyrical tale steeped in moralizing yet short on specifics. Frontstage DEI consists of sloganeering for an agenda of positive abstractions, seemingly admirable and even utopian. Indeed, this frontstage messaging is so aspirational that few persons could find anything objectionable in it.

DEI pronouncements are invariably suffused with a bit of reasonable frontstage program activity to provide a patina of legitimacy to the entire enterprise. Enough rhetoric of Enlightenment values is woven throughout the DEI lingo to establish familiarity and to resonate with reasonable people.

Much of it sounds like a program grounded in traditional liberalism, with fingers crossed that folks believe that “equity” and “equality” are one and the same. This facile resemblance to liberalism gets DEI’s foot in the door, with references to “educating for freedom,” “emancipation,” “love,” “community,” “dialogue,” “belonging,” “engaging with difference,” and even the occasional reference to “science.”

This is akin to the deceptive lingo used by cults to attract recruits—the Unification Church, for example, relies on “peace and unity” and love bombing to bait the cult’s hook. I speculate that many persons enamored of frontstage DEI initially have no idea that the backstage even exists, let alone the toxic ideology that animates it.

This is why so many otherwise intelligent persons are eager to “do the work.” They have switched off their critical faculties to favor a feelings-based affinity for the frontstage. They eagerly embrace the idea of viewing the world through an “equity lens,” which is otherwise known in mainstream academia as confirmation bias, the cherry-picking of data to confirm an already-held dubious belief. They buy into the façade of their own mental devising, and they simply remain unaware of the actual agenda and noxious ideology—whether through averted gaze, simple disinterest, inability to grasp what goes on, or the psychological need to be a footsoldier follower.

This is an intentional deception, of course. Behind this benign frontstage façade, we find the other face of the Janus—backstage DEI.

Behind the Façade: Backstage DEI 

Backstage DEI is informed by critical racialism and is grounded in a pre-Enlightenment Manichean ideology of paranoia and conspiracy. This is the anti-scientific world of the “medicine wheel” and the “talking stick,” a world of hyper-suspicion, delusions, and ethnic discipline, where minority professionals are cautioned that “skinfolk are not always kinfolk.”

It’s a world of arbitrarily defined villains and victims, of “agents and targets,” of “storytelling” and “autoethnographies” and “lived experiences” and “counternarratives” and “testimonios” and “indigenous” enchantment. In fact, it’s a world akin to the primitive romanticism of Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth in their reaction against the Enlightenment, favoring instead magical thinking, fables, and an emphasis on feeling rather than reason.

This ideology is commonly called antiracism.

This Orwellian contrivance of antiracism has little to do with battling actual campus racism and everything to do with codifying a paranoid conspiracy theory into university policy. The conspiracy theory identifies its racial scapegoat in the form of a pseudocommunity of persecutors, a key marker of paranoia. This paranoid worldview is implemented in training sessions through thought reform techniques developed by Mao’s China and modern American cults. The techniques are also grounded in group psychological manipulation pioneered by Kurt Lewin and Robert Kegan and further developed in its American “social justice” version found here and here, among many other sources.

If you’ve been exposed to training in “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” you may already sense something greatly wrong with all of this. It doesn’t align with reality. Indeed, where is all of this rampant racism that supposedly infests your campus yet is never identified?

You may have thought it was strange, contrived, unsubstantiated, and alien to your own broad and deep experiences. You may also believe it arrogant for a stranger to lecture you on your beliefs and your behavior based only on your superficial characteristics. In fact, if it seemed that you were and are under attack by zealots with a tiny and distorted worldview, that’s a common experience.

The training sessions offer benign-sounding labels—“difficult dialogues,” “courageous conversations,” “brave spaces,” “safe spaces,” and “racial caucuses.” These are all forums for the propagation of the antiracist paranoid conspiracy. 

This conspiracy emerges from shared paranoia. It is grounded in prejudice and Manicheism, is manifested in bombast, and it’s justified by outright pseudoscience based on the evidence-free assumption of a “racism” that is all but nonexistent in any meaningful form on campuses. Indeed, the absence of evidence and the hostility toward requests for such evidence of “racism” is the hallmark of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience.

This conspiratorial doctrine is suffused with paranoia, and the behavior of its adherents display all of these characteristics, often in exaggerated form: 1) displacement of responsibility, 2) suspiciousness, 3) grandiosity, 4) delusional fixity, 5) creation of a paranoid pseudo-community of persecutors, and 6) creation of a tight, self-sealing interpretive system. 

For this absurd fantasy to gain even a modicum of traction, a degree of deception and control is necessary. The odd training experience exhibits a tight control exerted by DEI cadre over the agenda and, of the sources presented, which consist of exotically curated material that excludes the substantial body of academic literature debunking the dubious propositions of antiracism and critical race theory animating “DEI.”

A pretense is maintained that this is academically uncontested territory.

It’s not.

Debunking and Deprogramming

In fact, much of what is presented has shaky foundations, is buttressed with poor evidence, or is simply fabricated. The material is drawn exclusively from the cargo cult canon of activist critical racialism. To maintain the façade, DEI training omits the substantial mainstream literature that debunks Harvard’s Implicit Association Test, that debunks the “microaggressions” paranoid construct, that exposes the primitive anti-science agenda of so-called antiracism, that explodes statistical disparities as constituting any kind of evidence of bias. My own research that demonstrates the antiracism agenda employs crude brainwashing techniques borrowed from the Communist Chinese and American cults. 

Moreover, the substantial wider body of literature of the academic world outside the tawdry little theater of critical racialism is excluded. Research by Thomas Sowell, John Staddon, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, John L. Jackson, Jason Hill, Jesse Singal, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Wilfred Reilly, and many others go missing in favor of a curated message of villains and victims drawn from the fevered minds of Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Paolo Freire, and Mao Zedong.

All this leads back, of course, to the neo-Marxist critical theorists (Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm) and ultimately to Karl Marx. Profoundly unoriginal, the critical racialist project on the campuses offers little more than the tired, crypto-Maoism of prior generations, refurbished to accommodate a new conceptual scapegoat to replace the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, and the capitalist roaders. The new villains of convenience are “whites,” “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” and “white privilege.” This is the social fantasy of the folks who “do the work.”

Small wonder that backstage DEI is kept obscured behind the frontstage façade, and it’s unsurprising that many persons are duped into embracing the agenda under such sketchy pretenses.

If you feel deceived, you can backtrack from this morass of critical racialism. You can “do the work” of deprogramming.

The first step in deprogramming from this toxic ideology is to recognize the Janus-faced character of frontstage and backstage DEI and that it presents a grossly distorted and incomplete version of reality, where villains and victims are marked by superficial characteristics and where students, staff, and faculty are dragooned into thought reform sessions. Understanding the good-and-evil DEI Janus is one key to understanding why the dystopian social fantasy should be rejected. Moreover, we see ample reason why the costly bureaucracies that administer these dubious programs on the campuses should be dismantled as well.

For a deeper dive into what constitutes the spirit of the authentic university, the accompanying graphic provides a list of essential references for cultural literacy in an uncertain world and recommended actions to roll back the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment vision of backstage DEI. 

These are works essential to an understanding of modern American society, especially in university environments virtually controlled by groupthink bureaucrats. By contrast, the scholars and genuine academics here offer a positive vision for America that is expansive, emancipatory, and liberating.