Deliver Us from Reality

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness 

“Because he can.” 

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway. 

Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.  

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it. 

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay. 

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes, 

that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda.

It’s not only the compact between the elite and the underclass that is relevant to our experience in the United States today. There is also the incontinent deployment of the word “democracy,” not as a term describing a specific form of political organization but rather as a cognitively empty but talismanic vocable around which political animus can be nurtured and set to work. The latest variation is Our DemocracyTM, dragged out whenever the process of political demonization needs a boost. 

“It has been frequently pointed out,” Arendt notes, “that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.” 

The reaction to the January 6, 2021 jamboree at the Capitol—an event egged on and at least in part organized by (alleged) state actors like Ray Epps—is a case in point. As he showed last week in his exchange with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Donald Trump began trying to diffuse the potential for violence at that protest the day before, on January 5, and he continued through the day on January 6. No matter. The script called for him to be the villain of the piece, so the villain he is publicly accounted to be. 

So many things in our social and political life today seem surreal. The prospect that “misgendering” someone might be against the law—i.e., a tort that did not even exist yesterday is now illegal; the whole phenomenon of so-called “transgenderism,” a revolt against reality if there ever was one; the bizarre obsession with race, involving the demonization of whites and the fabrication of an imaginary sin called “white supremacy,” on the one hand, and the groveling obeisance of phantasmagoric “reparations” to blacks, on the other. You can’t tune into the internet these days without being confronted with scenes of blacks rampaging through fast-food restaurants, school corridors, or shops like Target and Walmart. They smash and steal and smash and what happens to them? Nothing. All this and more is part of what Arendt called totalitarianism’s “experiment against reality.” 

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” she pointed out, 

totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

“The shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings.” That is what our masters are pretending to insulate us from with their fantastic lies about human nature, economic reality, and empirical truth. 

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile. The last word goes to Arendt. “Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general, and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.”

Christian Patriot News, On the Fringe, and more- May 14

 

The biggest leap of faith begins tonight... Part 1 of the Series Finale of NCIS LA airs tonight!! Will it be revealed that Hetty is on her way home? Will Kensi reveal to Deeks that they can adopt another child instead of having a baby? Answers and more coming in my review tomorrow!

The Potemkin Presidency and the Visceral Election

No high roads. Republicans and their PACs need to hammer past the media defense perimeter and expose the ugly presidential reality. It’s right there.

by Rod Thomson for American Greatness

Anyone who consumes any form of right-leaning alternative media, including that found on mainstream social media from Instagram to TikTok, is well aware that no public appearance goes by without Joe Biden doing or saying something cringey, or dangerous, or just nursing home-worthy. Everyday it’s another embarrassment.

It is obvious Biden has not been calling the shots since his 2020 basement campaign, but now he cannot get through a teleprompter reading without an ignominious screw up—including reading cues out loud and not even recognizing it. He doesn’t know where he is at times or how to exit the stage. And when speaking off the cuff, it’s just mortifying.

If Republicans and associated PACs will not just hit the easy button and run collages of Biden flubs and blunders—imagine the fun Trump could have with that!—half of the electorate will never know they exist.

This trove of damning evidence is largely only available within the confines of the right-leaning alternative media, as the corporate media has gone to jaw-dropping lengths pretending everything with this presidency is totally normal. In fact, the establishment would have us believe that a “return to normalcy” has been achieved. Well sure, if your idea of normal is the final stages of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.

I’ll let Left-biased ChatGPT speak for the Left-partisan media on the concealment point. When asked to list Biden’s gaffes, it responded:

Like any public figure, President Biden has had some verbal gaffes during his time in office. Some of these gaffes have received media attention, while others may have gone unnoticed. It’s worth noting that verbal gaffes are not unique to any particular individual and can happen to anyone.

(By the way, the AI was happy to list George W. Bush’s gaffes in response to the same prompt. It may be artificial intelligence, but it has real bias.)

This coming presidential election, as much as the last two, will be visceral. Because we have an increasingly ignorant electorate—there is no more ignorant voter than one wholly devoted to reading the New York Times every day—a good chunk of the swingy middle electorate will be moved by the visceral, the emotional, the easily understood and consumed. And that can be achieved most readily by dismantling the Potemkin Village that the corporate leftist media has erected to pretend we have a normal White House situation.

And let’s not forget our esteemed vice president. As much as Biden can’t get the words out, Kamala Harris can’t stop them from coming out. From her comments in Poland to those on community banking, it’s another target-rich environment. The steady theme is that both Biden and Harris in their own ways are incoherent. And again it’s obvious. No deep fake needed.

My fear is that too many Republicans will not take this route. To which I say: Get in it to win it, and play all the hardball necessary. The Left will most certainly spend millions promoting Donald Trump as a dangerous crazy with selective video from January 6, or Ron DeSantis as a friendless, robotic book burner.

Now, there are certainly plenty of issues that will need airing—an overrun southern border, the continuation of endless wars by proxy, stratospheric debt levels, inflation, and an economic recession will all be in the mix. But those require a bit more work to break through the psyche—except maybe inflation and a crappy economy. I recently wrote about Republicans’ wide open door in 2024 if they will hit the basic kitchen table issues of inflation, the economy, and wars and let PACs hit the woke insanities.

But visceral is easy and for better or worse (it’s worse) the emotional moves some of the votes easiest to move—those paying the least attention. Combos may be the most effective. Ads running compilations of Biden’s flubs followed by (cue the eerie music) text that outlines 6 or 7 million illegals, inflation, debt, Ukraine spending, and a tagline of: We can’t survive four more years. 

I’ll keep saying it. Republicans have to be out-of-character aggressive. We are facing an opposition that wants to destroy us in every way. It is existential. No more Mr. Collegial Nice Guy. The only way out is through.

College Curricula Should Cultivate Core Values, Not Shallow Diversity

A fixed, coherent, superior core curriculum at every liberal arts school is one way to supply our youth with what has been lost.

by Mark Bauerlein for The Federalist

Last week, interim President Richard Corcoran of New College of Florida, where I am a trustee, released an executive summary of a new core curriculum at the school. It’s a proposal in an early stage, but the first principle of a solid core is stated explicitly numerous times.

The summary doesn’t lay out particular courses that will make up the New College core, as reform began only a few months ago. But “Whatever the choices made,” Corcoran writes, “the program should be uniform.” Every student will pass through it, and everyone will read a set list of works (Plato, The Federalist Papers, and Tao Te Ching are mentioned). The sequence may run to a dozen courses divided into the two categories of “Techné” (science, technology, engineering, and math) and “Virtue” (humanities), not just the one or two Great Books courses that many schools including Harvard allow a few interested kids to choose.

This “central, common, intellectual experience” will “create a community,” Corcoran predicts, and not just within each respective cohort that passes through. Alterations from year to year will be rare. Progressivist educators insist that as the world changes the curriculum must change. They love innovation and the cutting edge. That desire won’t fly in Sarasota.

“The Virtue curriculum will be stable over time. Alumni children would read the same books which their parents read 25 years ago. The curriculum binds the NCF family across the generations,” Corcoran writes.

This fundamental commitment to sameness, commonness, and stability stands in forthright opposition to the customary blather about diversity, cultural relevance, social change, student choice, and other frameworks of “progress.” Bien pensant relativism that puts all cultures on the same level, that will not select certain creations and settings as essential, the rest as secondary, is utterly absent. The frank assumption of a special lineage of great works tells the young that they stand in the shadow of, precisely, greatness.

At one point, Corcoran refers to a history of science course that might be taught in the Virtue sequence, with a list of names: “Think Euclid, Pythagoras, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, etc.” To arrange the past like this is to present the students with a genealogy, which automatically gives their studies a structure that raises their thoughts and inducts them into the community of thinkers. To absorb Kepler’s laws of planetary motion is to be with Kepler.

Throwing out the Old

Let’s understand this as a matter of student health. First among the many educational crimes done to young Americans of the past two generations is the withholding of a coherent and elevated sense of the past. It started back in the previous century, when notions of diversity and multiculturalism broke up the old syllabus of Western civilization — English literature from Geoffrey Chaucer to James Joyce, the Enlightenment breakthrough, the Great American Novel, and other big-picture models — treating those noble lineages as exclusionary and unrepresentative.

Such inspiring traditions ended in a blaze of curricular reforms that downgraded dead-white-male stuff and emphasized select thinking skills (no more required U.S. history, for example, just any course that instilled “historical thinking” in some fashion). Educators cast the turn as overdue progress, an escape from the blinkered certitudes of Eurocentric agents.

They didn’t put anything in its place though — certainly not a rival big picture. Instead we have in the humanities a general education offering a little of this and a little of that, a Chinese menu of courses collected under abstractions such as Harvard’s “Aesthetics & Culture,” “Ethics & Civics,” “Histories, Societies, Individuals,” and “Science & Technology in Society.” That’s what Harvard came up with in 2009 when it revised its general education requirements: a set of generic labels that specify no content, no set body of knowledge.

Each section contains multiple choices that students can take that semester to meet the requirement. Under the first topic, we have “American Dreams Made in Hollywood and Beyond,” “Anime as Global Popular Culture,” “Black Radicalism,” “LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity,” and many more narrow and unrelated courses. No common material, no common experience, nothing that every student is supposed to study, or that is affirmed as so essential to an educated person that it cannot be avoided.

The broad message is clear: The past is a jumble. Students in Cambridge and a thousand other places draw the obvious conclusion that the centuries that preceded them have no purposive meaning, no momentum. What do they think as they pore over such course selections? “Hmm, that looks interesting. … Nah, not that one, not for me. … Uh, what does RateMyProfessors say about the teacher?” No topic is exigent, and no clustering of works announces to all, “This is your vital inheritance.”

No Shared, Eternal Truths

To be educated in this way is to grow old in a wavering, superficial habitat. Religious observance might fix it, but most millennials and Generation Z-ers don’t attend services. No transcendent orientation for them, no eternal beings or truths. They live in the present alone, here and now, isolated in their own experience. The formation, scattered and casual, reinforces their solitude.

The meaning of their lives shrinks to the grooves of achievement and self-gratification. No wonder 71 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds believe most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance.” In that 2018 survey, only 39 percent of 64-plus-year-olds agreed.

They wouldn’t feel that way if they had read the same books in school, studied the same events, and admired the same heroes. A canon would have taken shape in their heads, and in their friends’ heads too. They would have suffered and stumbled through The Scarlet Letter together.

If you doubt the brotherhood that such impositions create, take a look at how alums at Columbia University remember their year in its famed core curriculum. An administrator there told me once that the core would have been eliminated by faculty long ago if not for the passion of grads.

In effect, if we have enough of them, core curricula shore up a common culture. They also strengthen 18-year-olds entering the great big world and wondering where they fit. Faith in a legacy of genius and masterworks, fateful moments such as Charles Darwin on the Beagle and Julius Caesar at the Rubicon, all joining in a glorious march of civilization, help them do it well. A broken core doesn’t. The ressentiment that tears civilization down affects the psyches of the kids. Diversity, multiculturalism, a dismantled heritage, discredited traditions — they produce unhappy youths.

This is a matter of student health. Liberalism and progressivism have targeted the institutions and ideals that once handed the young a purposeful foreground for their lives (nation, church, community, family, tradition, western civilization, the American way). The sour, pessimistic, mistrustful mood of the millennials and Z-ers shouldn’t surprise us. A fixed, coherent, superior core is one way to supply them with what has been lost. We need it not just at New College, but at every liberal arts school in America.

Ground Reports – What is Your Experience With Prices of “Processed Goods” at Stores?

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Recently I went to the supermarket to pick up some general provisions.  Given the nature of previously predicted food price increases, and proactive measures to mitigate the predictable prices, I haven’t needed to purchase basic foodstuffs in a while.   Yikes!  The prices… Wow.

Since we originally warned in ’21 about the waves of food price inflation that were coming, the prices have more than tripled on many food commodities.  That part is not as surprising in current review; however, the prices of processed foodstuffs is, well, quite frankly astounding.

I am left to wonder how working-class people are able to afford the jaw dropping price increases in highly processed food products like condiments (mayo, ketchup, mustard, etc), and even coffee and milk.  I knew the processing costs would drive those prices, but the scale is just astounding.

Beyond the foodstuff, what was truly stunning was the current price of non-food items at the store.  Items like chemical cleaners, soaps, aluminum foil, trash bags, Styrofoam products, ziploc bags, paper goods, etc.   I mean seriously, $8 for a box of trash bags, good grief.

After a review of the non-food item prices, I went back to the recent BLS report [DATA HERE] to look at the producer price index to see if the data reflected the scale of the processing cost that I was reviewing across a broad spectrum of goods.

Are consumers getting gouged by manufacturers who are taking advantage of the price shock inside the ongoing inflation?

Or are the processing costs, mostly driven by energy price increases, really that big a factor in the end product as it is generated?

In the topline final demand Producer Price Index [Table A above] you can see how we are cycling through the second wave of inflation that hit in the spring of 2022.  The rate of price increase is lower, but the prices are still rising.  That means the prior massive price increase is now baked into the product, and the current price will never decline. Instead, it will just increase at a slower rate than before.

However, that’s not the full story… and that is not the data I was most curious about.

The intermediate product costs are really where the story is found.

Table B [DATA HERE] Tells us a remarkable story.

Raw materials (unprocessed goods) are essentially in a deflationary status [-19.2% in April].  Meaning demand for the raw material has dropped well below the available supply.  However, look at how much of the deflationary price is consumed in the processing of the raw materials.

A full 16% is consumed by processing cost increases [energy, physical plant, transit, production costs etc]. That is remarkable.

A random example might be citric acid.  The price of the citrus base drops 19.2%, but the processing of the base into the intermediate good phase chews up 16% of the drop in raw material price and exits processing only 3.2% lower in price than a year prior.

Another example might be found in plastics.  The petroleum base, and/or a combination of each material additive, might be 19.2% lower than prior year, but processing negates the lower raw material price, and exits into intermediate essentially even -.04, and then toward the ending +2.3% final demand change in the rate of price increase.

The PPI data is essentially showing the flow of costs of production as reflected in the impact during processing.  We can assume mostly increases in energy, transport and distribution costs to bring the raw material forward to final good status.

Key takeaway, the demand side of the raw material is diminished.  There is less raw material demand.  However, processing costs are continuing to drive the final production price of goods that head into the hands of wholesalers who then bring the product to market.

The outcome of this are the prices of processed goods as noted in the products on the shelves.

QUESTION: Are you noticing rather remarkable price increases in non-food goods during your store visits?

NYC Buses Illegal Aliens to Upstate NY, Hotels Kick out Homeless Vets as a Result

Mike MIller reporting for RedState 

Are you surprised to learn that Upstate New York hotels have begun to kick out homeless veterans to make room for illegal aliens bused in from New York City? If so, you shouldn’t be. Many of the vets are Vietnam-era veterans who were receiving temporary shelter in the hotels through the efforts of a nonprofit agency.

Nearly two dozen homeless vets, as reported by The New York Post, including a “24-year-old man in desperate need of help after serving in Afghanistan….were told by the hotels at the beginning of the week that their temporary housing was getting pulled out from under them at the establishments and that they’d have to move on to another spot.”

The Post’s cover was classic New York Post.

Imagine that. Seriously. A struggling 24-year-old veteran of the war in Afghanistan, no less, being told by a hotel his “extended stay” was over. “Thanks for staying with us, bud — please don’t come again!”

Nearly two dozen struggling homeless vets were booted from various hotels. Sharon Toney-Finch, a disabled veteran and the CEO of the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation (YIT), told The Post. YIT was created to help raise awareness of premature births, as well as to provide aid to homeless and low-income veterans in need of living assistance.

Our veterans have been placed in another hotel due to what’s going on with the immigrants. A lot of them are Vietnam veterans. We do help them on a constant basis to get them benefits and help them find a place in society. Now we have to work from ground zero. We just lost that trust [of the vets].

Toney-Finch said the hotels made the move to expel the veterans based on money:

They get paid more [for the illegals] That’s so unfair, because at the end of the day, we are a small nonprofit, and we do pay $88 a day for a veteran to be there.

Sorry, Ms. Toney-Finch, but Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Council not only have far more money at their disposal; they also want the illegal aliens shipped to the city by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — whose border towns are being overrun by tens of thousands of illegals — the hell out of NYC, ASAP.

New York Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro was justifiably disgusted by the news.

This is absolutely inexcusable and should not be happening in America. This is the result of incompetence and lack of compassion. This be won’t [sic] tolerated.

The good congressman apparently doesn’t understand Democrat priorities — vets be damned.

Here are a few specifics, via The Post:

Toney-Finch said 15 of the veterans got the heave-ho from the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh about 60 miles north of New York City in Orange County — a new epicenter of Big Apple’s migrant crisis since Mayor Eric Adams began bussing Gotham’s overflow there against local officials’ wishes.

The other five displaced veterans were split between two other local facilities — the Super 8 and Hampton Inn & Suites in Middletown, Toney-Finch said.

The Middletown hotels are not believed to have migrants yet but were reportedly on the city’s shortlist to take some.

She said the hotels didn’t explicitly say the vets had to move because of the migrants but that it was clear to her that was the case, given the timing. The vets were about two weeks into their hotel stays when they were kicked out, according to Toney-Finch.

State Republican Assemblyman Brian Maher said it’s important that hotels know the special importance of America’s military veterans.

Shining a light on this is important because we need to make sure these hotels know how important it is to respect the service of our veterans before they kick [them] out of hotels to make room. They really ought to think about the impact on these people already going through a traumatic time.

What’s “important” and “ought to,” to some, is irrelevant and “yeah, no” to others. But Maher did make an excellent point:

Whether you agree with asylum-seekers being here or not, we can’t just ignore these veterans that are in our charge that we are supposed to protect: the New Yorkers and Americans.

Amen, Mr. Maher.

As for those who decided to kick struggling homeless vets out of temporary living arrangements in deference to people who exploited federal immigration laws — for whatever reason, be it money, politics, or both — shame on them.

As for NYC Mayor Eric Adams, add “blatant hypocrisy” to the shame that guy deserves.

AP Lies About DeSantis, Gets Ratioed so Hard They Issue an Update

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Ron DeSantis appeared in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, packing out the indoor venue he gave his speech in. The picnic, which was a family event and fundraiser for Rep. Randy Feenstra, was also attended by Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds.

(Also see: DeSantis Savages a Reporter Who Tries to Push Radical Gender Ideology)

But according to the Associated Press, the story was that DeSantis showed “little effort” in trying to connect with the crowd of Iowa voters and grassroots activists one-on-one.

The Iowa visit, his second in two months, was expected to help address concerns about his sometimes awkward personal appeal as he met with Republican officials, donors and volunteers, all under the glare of the national media. But DeSantis devoted little time for selfies or handshakes in Sioux Center, where more than 600 people had gathered to see him at an event billed as a family picnic for U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra.

DeSantis left most of the politicking to his allied super political action committee, which had set up a table where prospective supporters for his yet-to-be-announced presidential campaign could sign up.

But was that true? In a word, no. For some reason, the AP found it necessary to tell an easily debunked lie. Immediately after the report, people began to post photos and videos of DeSantis spending ample time in the crowd, shaking hands, talking, and taking selfies. He even stayed afterward to cook hamburgers and thank volunteers.

The ratio was on at that point. Alex Thompson, who was not the writer of the article, got absolutely blasted for uncritically sharing the false article. You can click his original tweet above for a taste of how that went. Steve Peoples (the New York-based AP reporter who helped write the story) posted the same lie, and after similarly being ratioed to the moon, he issued an update to the story.

What was the update? Well, it at least admits that DeSantis did meet-and-greet for a while, though it is buried at the very end of the article in direct contradiction to the paragraphs I quoted above (which remain in their entirety).

After his speech, DeSantis spent about 15 minutes shaking hands and making small talk with voters as he maneuvered through the large audience, trailed by reporters, TV cameras and a security detail. He then dashed outdoors to pose with Reynolds and Feenstra while tending to burgers and pork chops at the grill.

Lyle and Sonia Remmerde of Rock Valley managed a handshake. She said DeSantis’ style comes across as “normal.”

So, what’s the deal here? Why even bother being dishonest about something so dumb? The answer is that the press has a preferred narrative about every major Republican. For DeSantis, it’s that he’s unlikable and can’t connect with voters.

Now, I know what you are thinking. How did a guy who supposedly can’t connect with voters just win Florida, a previously purple state, by 19 points? The answer is that he can connect with voters. The entire idea that DeSantis is some rigid stiff who doesn’t know how to shake hands and small talk is simply false, but it’s what the media runs with because they otherwise really can’t lay a glove on him. What else are they going to attack him for? Winning every major political battle in the state he runs?

Be prepared for a lot more of this nonsense. The mainstream press is terrified of the prospect that DeSantis might be the 2024 nominee. They want to smother any chance of that in the cradle. I’d recommend they try a little harder next time, though, because this was the weakest of tea.