Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Mandate
2. Wokeness
3. Tripwire
4. Chant
5. Newsom
6. Culture Wars
1. Mandate. In their attempt to change the focus of the discussion from the debacle in Afghanistan to something, anything else, the Harris – Xiden handlers and puppet masters trotted out their mouthpiece last week to hector, threaten, divide, and order Americans around. This time around, it will be a universal vax mandate, that he will leverage business to enforce for him (a truly fascist approach). It is the 80 million unvaxxed who are now Public Enemy #1, because the O’Bamaoids pulling his strings believe it is only Trump supporters who are not vaxxed. Rather, recent analysis shows that the unvaxxed are mostly minorities. If you slice it by education, it is the PhDs who lead the 80 million. Note that both groups helped put Harris – Xiden in office, so this might backfire.
- It appears that they are basing their demands on Jacobson v Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905). Business Insider posted an analysis on the case last Friday. I am not familiar with either this case or the ramifications associated with it and will have to get spun up over the course of the upcoming months. I expect we all will get a lot smarter in the months to come. The basics of the case comes from a penalty for anyone who refused to get a smallpox vax. At the time, these mandates were all at the state or local level, something the 1905 SCOTUS upheld. As with all sufficiently favorable SCOTUS rulings to the left, the took what was at the time a relatively narrow opinion and stretched it to something you could drive an 18-wheeler through. The new mandate is yet another stretch, as it is done at the federal level, nationwide, and demands businesses enforce the new rule. Congress is completely unnecessary in this discussion, by the way.
- A history of response to tuberculosis (TB) here in the US also informs the Harris – Xiden response. The disease has been around for a long time, bacterial in nature, and spread by aerosols. A century ago, people were removed from their homes and placed in sanitoriums for treatment. This was not always done voluntarily. At the time, one in seven people were infected.
- PowerLine this morning ran a great piece analyzing the speech. Most notably, they pick up on Xiden’s effort to spread fear and lay the groundwork for future action in the name of an alleged emergency. This is just the opening bid and will continue for a long, long time. He singles out the 80 million unvaxxed and calls it us against them. He relentlessly goes after the unvaxxed and the state governors who support them. Looks like his puppet masters believe picking a fight with red state governors is their vehicle to saving the 2022 election for democrats. In claiming to be protecting the vaxxed from the unvaxxed, he sets up a logical impossibility, for if vaccinations are the ultimate solution and will keep you safe forever, why is there any threat from those who haven’t had the jab as yet. He calls for respect for flight attendants hassling unmasked passengers. He calls the anger ugly, which is a hoot as his demonstration of anger at anyone who would oppose his demands. As those of us who have dealt with family members with Alzheimer’s, that anger is demonstrated more times than not during the course of the disease. He refuses to do anything about, much less even acknowledge the hundreds of thousands untested and unvaxxed illegals he is allowing into the country from Mexico. Do not ignore this speech. It is a full preview of coming attractions.
- The most important point Scott Johnson makes in the PowerLine piece is that this is intentional. The mandate and its use of the corporate world as its enforcement mechanism is intentional. It is a large caliber weapon aimed squarely at the red states, particularly the red state governors. They have chosen this fight. They have chosen this battleground. They want it here and now. The question on Our Side ought to be why here and why now? The “why now?” is relatively easy, simply to deflect from the disaster in Afghanistan. The” why here?” may be a lot deadlier to our side, as it may very well be the case that the O’Bamaoids behind this believe they can force this issue before the Roberts Court and get an affirmation upholding the 1905 Jacobson Opinion. It is our job to simply make them wish they had never picked this fight. Irish democracy would be a good place to start. For employees, go Cloward – Piven on your employers. Never resign. Force them to fire you. Bury them under a blizzard of religious and other exemption requests. Not gonna get a lot of business done or governing done if you are spending every waking second in HR dealing with discrimination complaints and exemption requests. There’s gonna be a lot of labor lawyers make a lot of money from this. Note that WA Governor Jay Inslee has modified state unemployment law so that anyone fired for refusing to be vaxxed is not eligible for unemployment, as it is a voluntary termination like a resignation. Inslee won’t be the last one who tries this.
2. Wokeness. Ran across an interesting piece by Richard Hanania entitled Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. This follows up to his two other pieces Why is Everything Liberal and 2016: The Turning Point, neither of which I read. I should have. Hanania’s piece on wokeness notes that liberals control institutions because the care more about politics than those of us on the right. As a result, it will make our attempts to use government to roll back culture unlikely to succeed at least in the short term. The anti-woke portion of conservatism is who he is speaking to. Other segments of the conservative movement have done quite well in opposing the left. These include gun people, abortion people and low tax people, all of whom have figured out how to have influence. Wokeness is not entirely a cultural phenomenon, though it does have a cultural component. Its basis is in civil rights law which has been in effect for the last half century. It is defined as a belief that any disparity in outcome favoring whites over non-whites or men over women is caused by discrimination. And the speech of those who would argue against that belief must be restricted. Finally, bureaucracies are needed to reflect those two, working to overcome disparities, managing speech and social relations. Each of these can be traced to federal law, starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmed and expanded by SCOTUS opinions and Executive Orders since. The federal racial policies led to the rise of corporate HR, which is now dominated by women. The EEOC ends up being the media’s enforcer over the corporate world. How do we fight this? The first thing would be to go after disparate impact. Get rid of the concept of hostile work environment. Repeal executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action. Much of this can be done without having to pass new laws. Why hasn’t this been done yet? Mostly because the payoff to fighting wokeness is longer term and conservatives have gotten it in their heads that it is impossible to fight. So, they don’t even bother to fight for something that is imminently winnable (note the anti-CRT fight in the public schools). You can’t win if you don’t fight. And you can’t’ fight if you’ve already given up. This is winnable. Time to get to work.
3. Tripwire. Speaking about wokeness, the CRO of Tripwire, a gaming development company located in Roswell, GA was forced to resign following a tweet supporting the recently passed Texas fetal heartbeat law. Tripwire makes first person shooters (among other things). It was the intense reaction among the gaming community that led to the firing. Gibson is a committed Christian who has used his position as CEO to modify the games based on his worldview, heavy metal Christian music in games, for instance. This surprised me as I didn’t know there was such a thing. The tweet is listed below. Apparently, Christians are not afforded the same right of their point of view as those on the other side. Time to change that.
4. Chant. Perhaps the kids are going to be all right after all, by this I mean the Gen Z’s. A couple weeks ago, at a college football game with Coastal Carolina, a few students started chanting “F#$% Joe Biden.” This spread to Virginia Tech and the videos went viral. The chants continued widely at college football games last weekend, mostly in the south, even making it to the national 9-11 MLB broadcast of the Yankees – Mets game. This started at college football games in the student section and spread. Expect it to continue to grow as the football season continues. Nice to see the youngsters giving the Commander in Chief the respect he has so competently earned and deserves.
5. Newsom. As polling is reported over the weekend, it appears that California Governor Gavin Newsom will survive his recall with a comfortable, albeit close vote. Democrats are still worried and have responded with their predictable voting fraud. Other participants include the LA Times with a series of breathtakingly racist articles in opposition to Elder. A white woman in a black gorilla mask threw a raw egg at Elder while he was visiting homeless encampments in Venice. None of the campaign has said much of anything about Newsom. They have said a lot about Elder, setting up a situation not unlike the 2020 election with everything about Trump while Xiden his in Delaware. My best guess is that should Newsom win, it will be entirely because he opened the public schools for the fall semester this year. If the voters are silly enough to not kick him out of office after everything he has done since being elected, they deserve everything he is about to do to them, in the words of HL Mencken “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
6. Culture Wars. Minding the Campus ran an interesting piece last week entitled The Culture War Against the Little Man. Jumping off point for this piece was a scathing LA Times editorial blasting the Orange County Board of Education who hosted a panel at a meeting on ethnic studies and CRT. The parents testifying before it demanded the Board ditch both. The parents and Board were accused of refusing to teach truth, harboring intentional biases, and illustrating “systemic and institutional racism.” This latest example of cancel culture shows the shifting power dynamics in the current phase of the culture war, pitting an elitist class of cultural bourgeoise and interest groups against the common man (and children). The panel spoke of an urgent need to rescue ethnic studies and public education from ideological hijacking of CRT. The LA Times editorial raised some real questions. Who gets to participate din public discourse on the latest and hottest educational cultural trends? If ethnic studies are an interdisciplinary study of different ethnicities and cultures in the US, shouldn’t multi-disciplinary scholars be able to contribute? Or should discussions be reserved for insiders and specialists? What purposes does the American public education system serve? Finally, what is the proper role of the press in a free nation – a watchdog for the people as reporters of facts or petulant apologists of an elitist race-centric ideology?
More later –
- AG