It’s Friday, January 20th, 2023…but before we begin, in honor of the great Thomas Sowell, we offer one brief, random thought on the passing Progressive scene, inspired by a meme from Ed Hickey…
…and a scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:
We inserted the words which appear on the blackboard behind Jimmy Stewart for clarity: Education is the basis of not only law and order, but our understanding of anything, including the very knowledge of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. As Paul wrote in Romans 10:14:
“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?“
“As author and scholar Steven Rummelsberg notes on a recent podcast, “The whole program, honestly, in the public schools, is meant to put a divide between the family and the child, the parents and the child.” The system is designed for that, he says, in order to separate children from the parental values which are at odds with the government’s social engineering. “There’s literally a concerted effort from [John] Dewey on to inculcate the values of the state, such that the children belong to the state and no longer to the parents,” he concludes.“
Here’s the juice: There is a direct link between the sources of lawlessness sweeping America, be it Antifa, Black Lies Matter or our disintegrating urban centers, and the deliberate dumbing down and indoctrination of generations of young people. Only the truth will set us free.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, consider this installment of the Sports Section, in which you can wonder along with us WTF is wrong with the National Hockey League?!?
“I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.”
Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov on refusing to wear a rainbow jersey for warm ups during “Pride Night” due to his Russian Orthodox faith. pic.twitter.com/wCUl8slmRB
“…The escalation in trans (-gender and -vestite) news in recent years has been truly mind-boggling. A fringe (don’t believe the new numbers) segment of the American public has been dominating the leftist news organizations. While it’s true that the MSM is just making it up as they go along, I would have guessed they’d go for something more leftist mainstream, like paying for everything that illegal aliens do once they arrive here.
Instead, they have decided that the woke agenda was best forced on American society via the “T” portion of the LGBTQ alphabet soup community. The woke trans agenda is everywhere now. We’re even seeing corporations get in on the messaging.
Here’s the thing, though: the more that the Democrats try to convince us that this is all normal and well, the moreoutlandish the trans crowd becomes.
Last month, I wrote a VIP column about trans dudes who are freezing tomato juice to help them mimic period symptoms. I won’t go into detail about exactly what the boys are doing with the juice, but I referred to them as “poopsicles” in the column. There are online forums discussing how best for a biological male who wants to pretend that he’s a woman to fake a period.
…We’ve been told over and over again that we’re supposed to have more sympathy for marginalized people in our society. That’s difficult to do when said people are going out of their way to be deliberately provocative and — dare I say it — triggering. Of course, if we mention that sticking frozen tomato juice in a rectum for a bit of make believe is disturbing or that guys doing tampon commercials is nonsensical and absurd, we’re called “transphobic.”
Nah, we’re just realists who know weird when we see it.
“On April 18, 2022 U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down President Joe Biden’s mask mandate for air and rail transportation. The Department of Justice quickly appealed the decision after a request from the Centers for Disease Control.
…DOJ continues this fight despite President Joe Biden declaring the pandemic is over and after a recent admission from White House COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha that masks don’t work to mitigate the spread of COVID-19…”
Biden’s COVID Czar Finally Gives Up on Mask Wearing
“There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well,” admitted Dr. Ashish Jha.
He says we should instead focus on making “substantial improvements in indoor air quality.” pic.twitter.com/va8lIVhn2I
The good doctor’s widely-varying figures notwithstanding (30…60…even 80%…why not more?!?), notice what’s not contained in his assessment: Any cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. Have public health officials truly learned nothing over the last two years?!?
“We’re well into winter, and the ongoing “tripledemic” — covid, flu, and RSV — is the sort of news story that may seem very big and consequential, or small and inconsequential, depending on your personal circumstances and how well those around you are faring.
A lot of people have gotten sick this winter. Flu season started early, but it’s already starting to decline in most areas, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reported Covid cases are up a bit, but nowhere near the numbers seen during the winters of 2020 and 2021; in fact, Covid cases are actually lower now than in the summer of 2022. Cases of RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) appear to have peaked in late November, though numbers are still fairly high.
As this newsletter noted at the beginning of winter, RSV is characterized by the CDC as “a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Most people recover in a week or two, but RSV can be serious, especially for infants and older adults.” Like a lot of other viruses, RSV is more dangerous to the very young, the very old, and the immunocompromised than to the average person. One theory for this year’s higher rates of all kinds of infections is that we spent almost two years taking all those precautions against Covid-19, which meant that our bodies encountered fewer viruses of any kind, so they’re out of practice at fighting off viruses.
…The RSV-vaccination effort will not be a direct sequel to the heated public battles over the Covid vaccine. Because RSV is primarily a threat to particular demographics, doctors and public-health officials will likely encourage those demographics to get the shot. It’s hard to envision any employer or government agency issuing mandates or firing those who refuse to take an RSV vaccine.
The mandate fights over the Covid vaccines may well have done significant damage to public faith in vaccines in general. As for the Covid boosters, the public’s interest appears to be rapidly dwindling. From here on out, updated Covid boosters will cost you, or your insurance company, about $110 to $130 per dose. The number of Americans who got the Omicron-focused booster was dramatically lower than in previous rounds of Covid vaccinations — and that’s for a shot with no cost to the person getting it or to that person’s insurance company. My guess is that even fewer Americans will be interested in boosters once there’s a price tag attached.
But there is some contrasting news. Flu vaccinations are up this year, according to the CDC: “National coverage for all adults, including Puerto Rico, is 4.1 percentage points higher this season compared with the same time last season (39.8 percent compared with 35.7 percent).” In a survey conducted from December 15 to December 25, 45.2 percent of adults said they had already gotten a flu vaccine, and 17.1 percent said they probably or definitely will receive a vaccine this year.
I’m pro-vaccination, but I’ve also called out those who exaggerated the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines, from President Joe Biden, who declared, “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else,” to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who asserted, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person. . . . It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.” I’ve called out public-health officials for refusing to object to those statements, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky forrefusing every possible opportunity to correct Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nonsense claim that more than 100,000 American children were in serious condition, and many on ventilators, because of Covid-19.
With very few exceptions, public-health experts acted as if telling a lie that might encourage vaccination or make Covid sound even scarier than it is represents some sort of virtue.
A few days ago, medical student Kevin Bass observed that Twitter’s discussion of Covid has separated into two diametrically opposed positions: “1. Every heart condition, ever, is due to the vaccine.Vax is going to kill everyone.2. We must be vaccinated every 3 mos, w/ N95 masks + Chinese-style lockdowns. To do otherwise is anti-science + eugenics. Everyone I know has long COVID.”
As they say, it’s funny because it’s true.
There are some Americans who can’t wait to restart the mask fights of the past few years. A group of Los Angeles Unified School District parents wants the schools to bring back mask mandates. The fact that the district “strongly encourages” wearing masks, and that their own kids do, isn’t sufficient, they contend.
Public health is trickier than it looked from the campaign trail of 2020, when Biden pledged he was going to “shut down the virus.” For a brief period in May 2022, the public discussion of monkeypox made it sound like the sequel to Covid, with the president unhelpfully warning that monkeypox is something “that everybody should be concerned about,” even though it was spread only by close skin-to-skin contact and in the overwhelming majority of cases among gay men — or to use the public-health community’s preferred locution, “men who have sex with men.” By August, the Biden administration was getting lambasted for “poor communication [on monkeypox], tons of paperwork, slow-moving bureaucracy, confusing and contradictory regulations, mandatory inspections, and glacially paced approval processes delaying the distribution of key vaccines” — which was more or less how the U.S. government had responded to Covid-19.
You notice the recurring theme of President Biden not knowing what he’s talking about and making things worse.“
In every case, on every level, without exception.
For more on the subject, we highly recommend Jeff Tucker’s piece at The Epoch Times: To Be Ruled by Liars:
“The last several years have revealed something we never wanted to believe. Major swaths of the leaders of our public culture—in government, media, and industry—have been lying to us. They had their reasons and certainly believed that their lies were necessary and thus noble. But still we know now what we once suspected but lacked confirmation: the loss of liberty in our times is rooted in core claims that have proven to be untrue.
We could go through the list but you already know the litany: the severity of the virus, the utility of the lockdowns, the functionality of masks, the danger to kids, the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, the impartiality of social media, and so on.
But the really big one is hitting us very hard, namely that this was never really about public health. The officials and agencies that were leading the response were not actually scientists and public health authorities. Deeply embedded agents of the national security state were the real movers and shakers throughout.
There is more than enough evidence now to justify this realization…”
Meanwhile, the Journal‘s Gerard Baker provides some insightful analysis of…
“The Great Gas Stove Rebellion of 2023 probably won’t resonate with future generations of freedom-loving folk the way the Boston Tea Party does. It’s unlikely that the plucky protagonists in the struggle to save our ovens and ranges from the grasping hands of regulatory totalitarianism will one day be celebrated as the Samuel Adamses and Patrick Henrys of the kitchen appliance age.
“Give me smoothly regulated gas-flow cooking capability or give me death!” has a flaming blue ring to it. But it lacks somehow the peal of urgency, the alarm of existential threat our stone-kiln-firing predecessors could adduce to fuel their noble cause.
Still, the little victory secured last week over the forces of progressive technocratic authoritarianism is significant in its way—even if it may prove only provisional and someday in a bleak, electrified future, our Vikings and Kenmores are eventually prised from our cold, dead hands.
The small triumph chalked up for common sense and normality is so rare these days it’s worth celebrating in itself. It’s also a useful reminder that the inexorable march of government mandates, the endless effort by our rulers to enforce their “scientifically” unchallengeable dogma on what they see as a population of ignorant drudges, can be resisted.
More than that, the way the episode played out last week has been an instructive exercise in how modern society advances, how the ascendant left is the locomotive force behind our culture and politics. We evolve today through the imposition from above of new rules and dogmas—as if that is a stable, natural process and any attempt to resist it is ignorant, reactionary extremism.
You can tell this from the way in which much of the media reported on the attempted gas-stove grab. As conservatives—and, much of the apolitical public—began to raise their voices against Commissar Richard Trumka Jr.’s diktat declaring war on gas stoves, the media took up the familiar narrative. “How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars” explained Time Magazine.
An unelected officialproposessome indefensible new regulation in the name of “science” that materially and adversely affects the lives of tens of millions of Americans—and it is somehow another front opened by the “right wing” in their “culture wars.”
It happens all the time. You can frame a good deal of the political and cultural evolution of the country in the past few decades in this way: The left elites compel adherence to their latest ideological orthodoxy and anyone questioning it is waging culture war. It happened with same-sex marriage, the idea that sex is independent of biology, the proposition that all white people are racist, the assertion that the planet is burning. All started out as intellectual hobbyhorses of the left fringe and quickly wound up being examples of the “far right” trying to impose its will.
This fits the wider narrative of our ruling intellectual classes: that it is the conservative side of the political spectrum that has gone extreme, that all our contemporary political woes—hyperpartisanship, divisiveness, the extremism of our political discourse—can be traced to the Republican Party’s jumping off the right of the ideological diving board into the deep end of fanaticism.
Yet the 2022 Gallup Poll Social Series, an annual survey of thousands of Americans, found new confirmation that it is the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that has moved toward the extreme in the past few decades and in the process has driven much of the cultural agenda...”
Unfortunately, often with the acquiescence if not outright assistance of a significant portion of the GOP and its leadership.
Moving on, here’s another sextet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Since we’re on the subject of inquiring Conservative minds, they want answers to the questions Jim Geraghty recently posed: Who ordered the review of the papers at the Penn Biden Center? Why were Biden’s closest and most trusted aides — covered by attorney-client privilege — preparing to vacate office space at a center named after him? Who decided that the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was not a good place to store documents from Biden’s time as vice president, and why?
(2). Courtesy of Fox Business Tonight, David Asman and Kim Strassel (you can link to Kim’s latest column on the subject here.) discuss the many holes and inconsistencies in the tangled webs being weaved around Biden’s Docugate:
(3). The DOJ’s conduct in Docugate has been so egregious even the even-handed Andy McCarthy is suggesting Merrick’s Marauders be indicted for felony mishandling of classified documents, seeing as they put partisan politics above national security in deciding, as the Journal reported Tuesday, “Biden aides without security clearances, rather than the FBI, should conduct searches virtually certain to turn up classified documents.” When the title of an Andy McCarthy commentary uses a term like “gross negligence” to describe the actions of the Attorney General of the United States, it’s for very specific reasons and with clear intent.
(5). Writing at NRO, Stanley Kurtz explains why Ron DeSantis’s refusal to approve the AP African-American Studies program, as written, is entirely justified, being it’s in clear violation of Florida law. While the College Board refuses to divulge the actual contents of the course, it is known to promote, among other Left Wing causes, a Socialist agenda.
(6). The Editors at NRO highlight one aspect of San Francisco’s utterly insane “reparations” program we failed to note:
“If one considers the taxpayers of San Francisco, who will actually foot the bill for this, the case for saddling them with financial responsibility for American slavery — or even more recent injustices — becomes even more ridiculous. Over 34 percent of San Franciscans are foreign-born, having no historic ties to the American past. That number has been above a third for four decades, and it was also consistently between a third and half of the city’s population between 1860 and 1910. It’s been 40 years since non-Hispanic whites made up a majority of San Francisco’s population, which as of the 2020 Census was 33.7 percent Asian American (including South Asian) and 15.6 percent Hispanic. San Franciscans are being penalized for the sins of someone else’s fathers.“
Which brings up one other question: What about the descendants of Blacks who themselves owned slaves? Or do they get to double dip?
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Jeff Foutch…
…Balls Cotton…
…and Ed Hickey:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with Parts 2 & 3 of Townhall.com‘s disturbingly sordid story featured in our last edition of The Crime Blotter:
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