Privilege, White and Otherwise

A recent fad among the social justice warriors is to accuse anyone who disagrees with their demands of having led a privileged life where because of their skin color, gender, or financial status they were allowed access to education or opportunities the poor African-Americans/Latinos/LGBTQ minorities and women weren’t.  This, much like the critical race theory, started as a social justice academic theory widely embraced by those seeking something to hang all the social failures on.

An interesting aspect of the recent “hate crime” scandal in Chicago is how little we hear of the privileges afforded a connected black actor.  Here we have an individual with connections back to the former Senator from Illinois and President.  An actor who claimed he was a victim of a hate crime in that den of MAGA politics – Chicago.  When the police investigated – their findings suggested he was the principal organizer of this farce.  He was dutifully charged, arrested and posted a bond to ensure his return to court.

We will never know beyond a reasonable doubt if he was guilty or was truly a victim because while this was playing out in the public arena his political connections were working behind the curtain to have the charges dismissed.  The fact all of the behind the scene players shared a party allegiance makes this scenario all the more credible to the average outside observer.  The telling thing in this negotiation was the charges went away, but he lost his bond money.  If, in the opinion of the prosecutor, the charges were found to be unsupported by the facts why did she keep the bond money and suggest it would go into the coffers of Chicago?  It is almost as if she concluded the actor should pay a small price for wasting the time of the Chicago Police Department.

This is just the simplest of scandals but it reflects clearly why the average middle-class citizen is losing faith in the judicial system because of the obvious double standards of accountability.  When the ideal of equal justice under the law no longer exists, can our government long continue?

Don’t get me wrong, I think privilege exists.  It has always existed but as the term is used in today’s society it has been bastardized to such a point the average woke SJW who uses it as a club really doesn’t have a clue as to where and how actual privilege is determined and applied.

For example, isn’t it the privilege of wealth and connection that afforded those involved in the most recent academic admission scandal to gain access for their children to the colleges of their choice?  The irony is so many of those taking advantage of their privilege were more than happy to tell the rest how we must think and behave to be socially acceptable.

Where There's a Will

What do you do if you have a problem that is too big to tackle the conventional way?  Why you get creative and find solutions you can implement, even if it means breaking a few eggs.

That appears to be the case with the Democrats right now.  Rather than admit they lost the last election because of a flawed candidate and an equally flawed campaign strategy they have chosen to focus on the issue of our electoral college versus the massing of democratic voters in big cities in the east and west.  The mantra from the DNC after President Trump’s upset victory has been “But we won the popular vote!  It just isn’t fair!”

Now we have states with Democratic Governors and State Houses beginning to move to invalidate the will of their own voters and cast their lot with those of NYC, LA, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, and the other major metropolitan areas.  How are they doing this you ask?  Easy, they write legislation that will commit their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote.  The assumption being no Republican can ever win over the majority of voters so they will most certainly go to support the Democratic candidate. 

But what if a Republican were to campaign and win in the cities, but not the flyover states?  While not an obvious scenario, it is possible.  What if a Republican were to win the popular vote and not the electoral vote, would these same Democrats rejoice in their decision?   For example, suppose there was a fissure in the DNC and one of the losing primary candidates decided she should run as an independent, as happened in the 1960 election.  In that election, Nixon lost to Kennedy by less than 115,000 votes (a result that would be immediately challenged in recount) but lost in the electoral college by 84 votes.  What if the contest had ended in a tie in the popular vote with the independent candidate drawing off just enough of the democratic vote?

So far, Colorado has taken the lead, but Delaware and perhaps other states will follow.  The funny thing is politicians never seem to learn from past experiences, and this appears to be another example.  Remember when the Democratic Senate cast aside the tradition of requiring 60 votes to confirm a judge and now find themselves on the losing side of simple majority votes?  Today, thanks to their shortsightedness, all they can do is attempt to destroy the person in the hopes they will withdraw or be withdrawn by the President.

Not being a Constitutional scholar, I wonder how the choice to align electors with the popular vote, rather than the votes cast within the state will play out as these laws are challenged in the courts?  And they most certainly will be challenged for on their face they potentially disenfranchise the choice of over 50% of the state’s voters.

What I do know is these types of moves can and will be cast as responding to the will of the people, but in reality, they are nothing more than political power grabs that remove any illusion that politicians believe the people they were elected to serve should have a voice in the governments they run.

Around and Around We Go.

There has been another mass shooting, this time in New Zealand.  At last report at least 49 are dead.  The crime took place in a Mosque in Christchurch, with the shooter being identified as an Australian “white nationalist.”  As is now the case both sides have their prepared talking points, and counter-talking points, so little beyond the usual rhetoric will actually change.

For those who wish to make this about the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment rights, I am still waiting to hear how gun confiscation will actually end these types of violent acts.  Just for the record, I think gun confiscation will be no more effective than alcohol confiscation was in the 1920s, but please feel free to educate me on how much better your ideas are than those who championed the 18^th Amendment.

If Only

Acknowledgement:  I would like to thank someone I don’t know who felt compelled to comment on a post about Donald Trump for providing the genesis for these thoughts.

“If only we had a President who respected Congress and our laws.”

Yes, if only we had a President who like Andrew Jackson, founder of the modern Democratic party, so respected our laws and our nation that he worked tirelessly to kill off the Native Americans so his friends could take their land.

Yes, if only we had a President like Woodrow Wilson, who ensured we maintained the white/black segregation within the Federal government, and who with his enlightened friends like Margaret Sanger viewed Blacks as inferior, and should be shown their place.  Someone who brokered the Treaty of Versailles whose punitive agreements and division of Europe created the conditions for the Nazi party’s rise to power.  He also helped create the League of Nations but was unable to convince the Senate to agree with U.S. membership.  He was clearly a President of the people, as long as they were white.

Yes, if only we had a President like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who viewed his own imperial status as above the tradition set by George Washington to serve only two terms.  A President who attempted to pack the Supreme Court when it wasn’t ruling as he thought they should, and who at the onset of World War II imprisoned over 150,000 Americans simply because of the national origin.

If only we had a President like John Fitzgerald Kennedy who promised the anti-communist Cubans that the United States would support them if they decided to return to Cuba and fight Castro, and when push came to shove let them die on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

What I wouldn’t give to have a President like Lyndon Baines Johnson, who did little to support the equal rights acts passed by the Congress, but made sure he and his Secretary of Defense micromanaged a war that would cost 50,000 American lives.  Along the way, he created welfare programs promising a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but in reflection really just created a new class of economic slaves.

Man, Barrack Obama.  Now there was a President.  Coming into office as the first African-American he held the promise of unifying the nation like no one before him.  After eight years in office, he left creating greater racial and religious divide than anyone the KKK could have hoped for.  His respect for Congress was unequaled.  His party stonewalled 8-years of legislation and abandoned the traditions designed to encourage bi-partisan legislation.  His quote, “I have a phone and I have a pen” will stand as a testament to his love of the law and Congress.  A President who had no qualms about using the national intelligence agencies to spy on his opponents or even the average American.  A President who weaponized supposedly neutral agencies like the IRS and FBI to hunt down and destroy all those who didn’t share his vision of “Hope and Change.”

Oh, what it could have been like if we had just elected a woman who has more skeletons in her closet than she has shoes.  Someone who is directly responsible for the creation of ISIS with her support for the overthrow of two African regimes not led by religious zealots.  I am totally sure she would have worked with Congress and respected the laws she had ignored all those previous years.

Apparently, Civics is not taught these days so we can make the same mistakes over and over again.  If only we had a President who the press liked so we could ignore all his imperfections or a political party that was willing to accept the Constitution as the governing document for our nation...

Governing in the Age of Outrage

This week’s outrage seems to focus on two freshman Representatives in the House.  Individuals who’ve made it quite clear they believe their faith is superior to all others and another faith is to be vilified and eliminated, if possible, from our political system as a good first step to its total elimination from the world.  They are supported by a third media savvy Representative and backed in a kind of “kid gloves” approach by their party leaders who choose to condemn anti-tolerance, but not really THEIR anti-tolerance.

Of course, those who recognize the hate speech as hate speech are all over this, many going so far as to question why we are even allowing “their religion” and “their views” to be a part of “our government.”

I guess the real question is how far will identify politics go, or how long will it take before we achieve the ultimate end of a representative government able to work for a common good, rather than vilification of all the various groups who are a foundation of what was once a homogeneous nation?

I use the term "homogeneous" for that is what I was taught as a boy.  “E Pluribus Unum” is found on our coinage, and it was put there intentionally to remind us that we are “Out of many, one.”

It should be obvious to anyone who cares to actually look at the issue of identity politics – it is all about the gaining of power and position in society.  There is no real secondary reason.  It is justified by saying we need to seek all the social buzz words like “tolerance,” “equality,” or “justice” but at the end of the day the groups who make these claims have shown no real evidence they want to stop at recognition or equality, they all want to dominate and destroy their opponents, just as the tycoons of the industrial age sought to dominate and destroy their rivals.  I think I can safely conclude this is a human standard, which would carry back to almost all human societies throughout written history.

As we embrace the new standards of identity politics and its major components of victimhood and intolerance it seems inevitable the two major parties, who’ve more or less guided this nation since the mid-1800s, will fracture and divide and perhaps become a multitude of parties with a need for coalition building – as is common in most parliamentary governments.  Unfortunately, most coalition building requires acceptance of mutual common ground, and in the age of Twitter^© common respect and acceptance seems increasingly unlikely in the public forums.

Just my two cents.

Learn to Code

Recently, "Learn to code" became an internet trope (or was it a meme?). These new phrases are so confusing since their usage seems to change daily.

Of course, the recently out-of-work journalists to whom this advice was offered were all morally outraged and their still working colleagues rushed to their defense with the insightful claim "learn to code" is now actually a racist statement, unlike when it was used to tell the out of work coal miners during the Obama administration.  Back then it was just friendly, although it sounded a lot like snide, advice.  But that was in another time, and with other people who clearly had the miners best economic interest at heart.

Imagine my shock when in today's e-mail I received a solicitation from Microsoft to support an organization who promised to use my donation to help girls "learn to code."

Thankfully, I have been paying attention to the still employed social justice warriors in the media and I know this is clearly an anti-feminist and racist attempt to subvert the fight for social justice and would only serve to divert people from the grievance study programs so important in today's world.

Asking a girl to learn to code -- what an outrageous demand.  We are better than that.

Living in the Real World

Perhaps one of the funniest things I watch these days is the variety of Twitter storms that flash up and are feed by people who’ve come to believe their opinions are totally insightful.  Of course, I approach these festivals of insight with a bias; developed from years of listening to self-important people explain to me all that is wrong with the world, and how if we just do what they suggest it will be great.

For example, as an impressionable young man growing up in the hometown of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I was persuaded by the charism of JFK, and then the social conscience of LBJ as he proposed we greatly expand the welfare state to help those struggling with poverty and no medical insurance.  That plan was going to create a “Great Society” where poverty would be a thing of the past.  Although I didn’t pay too much attention to the details I was sure the creation of Medicare would dramatically improve the health of the nation.  It was only years later that I began to wonder who was paying the bills for it?

Then the self-important created federal enterprises to encourage mortgage companies to write more loans so more poor people could buy houses.  Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac would buy the mortgages from the banks, in theory freeing up bank money to write more loans.  Of course, with the assurance of the Federal Government to back the loans the bankers assumed increasingly less risk and wrote increasingly more risky loans.  Then, in 2008, we had a day of reckoning and all that risk came crashing down.  How many people lost their homes because they had paid far too much for a house, based on an assumption that if they lived in it a couple of years they could turn around and sell it for far more than they paid for it?  It was almost as if we just knew we couldn’t be as foolish and greedy as those poor saps in 1929.

Now we are told the world will end in 12-years, or so, if we don’t get rid of everything that uses fossil fuel.  Again, it seems eerily like the warnings issued a few dozen years ago that unless we immediately got rid of nuclear power we would suffer catastrophic meltdowns what would burn through the earth’s core.

The issue I have with these self-important people making these catastrophic predictions is they seem totally unwilling to lead by example.  It is almost like they are our fathers.  “Do as I say, not as I do!”  Those who seem to have the loudest voices regarding the end of the world also seem to be the ones flying on their own jets, or living in their own multimillion-dollar homes.

Recently, the freshman Representative from New York’s 14^th District proposed a radical new approach to saving the world, one that by her reckoning will end in 12 years, where aircraft would be abandoned for highspeed trains and cars powered by hydrocarbon fuels would go the way of the Edsel.  When the NY Post observed she routinely flies from DC back to NYC she posted.  “Living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working towards a better future.”  Last time I checked there was a train that ran from NYC to DC and back. 

Apparently, socialists don’t like to be called out for their inconsistencies’.  As one commenter to her tweet noted, “I’ll start listening to your advice when you do.”