Category: Culture

Cultural climate change the real existential threat

The confluence of multiculturalism, intersectionality, and extreme wokeness has led to its own rapid climate change.  %his one is far more certain, much more concrete, and eminently easier to spot.  It is cultural climate change…to the nth degree.

We are once again seeing preference given to people strictly on the basis of their skin color.  Black Lives Matter, All Lives Do Not.  Racial preferences abound in college admissions practices.  Black?  You’re in!  Asian?  You’re out!  We are now, once again, segregating dorms, graduation ceremonies, and just about everything else, based solely on immutable characteristics such as skin color.  There has even been talk in some states and localities of giving race-based preference for COVID-19 vaccinations.

Everyone must participate in the Big Lies, or risk ostracization, loss of employment, or worse.  Repeat after Dr. Fauci: “COVID-19 is an existential threat, therefore we must all hide in our homes and cover our breathing apparati.  Only a vaccine can set us free again…sort of, maybe.”

Repeat after the mainstream media, Deep State, and the Biden administration: “There was no fraud in the 2020 presidential election.  Anyone who believes that is a nutcase and should be prevented from speaking in a public forum…if not prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Repeat after the mainstream media: “Trump colluded with Russia.  He is a Russian asset, a plant.  He is an existential threat to democracy and this nation that we all love so dearly.  And Russia massively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, probably enabling Trump to win.”

Repeat after the education establishment, Big Media, Big Tech, Big Entertainment, and the Biden administration: “The U.S. is, and always has been, a systemically racist nation, overtly hostile to peoples of color; the LGBTQIA Community; and anyone not a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual Christian male.”

Also repeat after the education establishment, Big Media, Big Tech, Big Entertainment, and the Biden administration: “It is our moral duty to allow every person of color, every non-Christian, everyone from any marginalized group to leave their own country and seek a new and promising beginning in the United States, without exception, that they might have a chance at a better life.”

I fully expect to see, in the very near future, formalized preference for Womyn, peoples of color, and members of the LGBTQIA Community at amusement parks, in post office lines, at lunch counters, for cancer screening and baptisms, at boat launches…and probably everywhere else.

You sense it.  You feel it.  You know it.  This type of climate change is real.  And damaging.  As are all forms of institutionalized racial preference and discrimination.

How Totalitarianism Rhymes Throughout History: Czechoslovakia, China, & Venezuela

“It can’t happen here” is a political cliche in the United States. Regardless of your personal viewpoint, there is a vast swath of the American population who simply do not believe in the possibility of any kind of totalitarianism in the United States.

It’s worth noting that throughout history, in virtually every place that totalitarian regimes have arisen, the residents of these countries felt the same way. Russia was seen as too traditional and backward, the power of the Czar too entrenched to be defeated. Germany had been viewed throughout most of the modern period as the home of Goethe, Schiller, and Mozart, a place where the local Jewish population had largely assimilated.

Because totalitarianism emerges differently throughout history in different countries, it’s crucial to take a broader view of how totalitarian regimes arise. For example, when we’re discussing the rise of communism or the rise of fascism, we see different trends in Russia than we do in China, different trends in Italy than we do in Germany. When we examine multiple, somewhat lesser known examples of the rise of socialism throughout the world, we paint a picture of the different ways in which socialism originated and its possible resurgence.

This case study of terror analyses three examples of totalitarianism throughout history. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party was able to establish the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by leveraging little more than a strong showing – but not a victory – in the parliamentary elections. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Communist China in the 1960s, Chairman Mao came out of relative isolation to radically remake an already communist country. Lastly, we will look right in America’s backyard at the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

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10 Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup

One potential positive from the whole Covid-19 debacle is that we have learned an incredible amount about the society in which we live. This will be crucial if we manage to stave off a descent into a nightmare future of techno-fascist slavery.

We will have a new understanding of what our world has become and what we would like it to be in the decades and centuries to come. And “we” means we. While the majority have, apparently, learnt nothing at all from what has happened, they will eventually catch up.

There is no way that knowledge gained by a wide-awake 15% or 20% of the population will not end up being shared by almost everyone. Once the truth is out, it tends to stay out. As H.R. Haldeman so wisely put it, “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”.

Here are Ten Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup.

1. Our political system is hopelessly corrupt. 
Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.

2. Democracy is a sham.
It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.

3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power
and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation. It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.

4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort.
From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.

5. Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake.
The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.

6. Most people in our society are cowards.
They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.

7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system…
…and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.

8. Police are not servants of the public…
…but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.

9. Scientists cannot be trusted.
They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

10. Progress is a misleading illusion.
The “progress” of increasing automation and industrialisation does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction.

Stillwater high schoolers stage ‘Back the Blue’ walkout

A group of Stillwater Area High school students walked out of class Thursday morning to show support for police officers.

Students were encouraged to wear blue and bring thin blue line flags. A group of counter-protesters also showed up.

The “Back the Blue” rally lasted about 20 minutes before everyone went back to class.

I wonder if these people even have the level of self awareness to realize their hypocrisy.

The Gospel of Failure
Our ruling classes just keep insisting on the same bad ideas.

Let me say, first, that I take no joy in Bill and Melinda Gates’s divorce. The union of two souls in one flesh is a deep-set spiritual reality, whether the participants know that or not. Things fuse so naturally in marriage that you hardly notice: bank accounts, social networks, families. Untwining two lives means tearing all that asunder. It can devastate even adult children, of which the Gateses have three. I grieve for them.

But because I take this so seriously, I cannot help remarking that these two people have expressed no intention to reflect, even for a second, on what divorce implies about their qualifications as global lifestyle coaches. Absent from all their public statements thus far has been any indication that this represents a significant personal breakdown for both of them, or that such breakdowns should give pause to people who wish to tell us all, every one of us, how to live. 

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The Show That Captures America’s Changing Gun Culture

John Keys became one of the millions of Americans to buy their first gun in March 2020. As an African American, he was part of the fastest-growing demographic to do so.

“Right at the height of all of the craziness is when I bought my first pistol and rifle,” Keys told The Reload. “I didn’t know where all that was gonna go. So I just figured, ‘you know what, let me go to this gun show and just try to pick up a rifle and a pistol before I can’t get it anywhere.’ It was the last gun show before they shut everything down.”

Less than a year later, he’s part of another expanding group: new gun owners who have already turned into activists. He now co-hosts Guns Out TV with Shermichael Singleton, another black gun owner. The pair uses the program to show what black gun ownership in America looks like while being educational and, especially, entertaining.

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Root of Mass Shootings Pandemic Is Not Gun Access

Growing up in rural South Carolina on my family’s farm, I developed a love, appreciation, and, most importantly, a respect for firearms.

To this day, I remain a collector of firearms and a supporter of the American right to keep and bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment. I was taught that safety is paramount to gun ownership, so I have always encouraged responsible gun ownership and use for all Americans.

With that being said, I have noticed a disturbing trend in our country: an ever-increasing number of shootings and gun-related deaths.

And while the quick response from some, namely the left-wing mainstream media and liberal politicians, is to ban weapons and become more restrictive, it appears to me that we have serious mental health and poverty issues contributing to gun violence. I don’t believe that banning guns will result in any significant decline in shootings attributed to these two categories.

In the United States, since January 2021, we have had 195 mass shootings, with 245 people dying and approximately 731 wounded, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker.

While it’s important to acknowledge that there is not a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “mass shooting,” these numbers are staggering. They are some of the highest numbers in the industrialized world.

Let’s contrast 2021 with when I was growing up, when mass shootings simply weren’t a problem. I believe that this is the direct result of the era and the family structure: Parents were involved in their children’s lives and children were taught discipline and respect.

By and large, members of my generation were raised in households with two parents, and we were taught how to deescalate and talk things out when problems arose. Today, that no longer seems to be the case.

We have a moral and social failing in our country that has caused an increase in mass shooters, predominantly young men. One has to pause to think about what’s different today from 30 or 40 years ago. It certainly isn’t guns, because it’s harder to get guns today than it was in the past, when you didn’t have to go through nationalized background checks. When I was growing up, you could purchase a firearm with no questions asked, yet we didn’t see so many mass shootings.

America’s young men are struggling with mental health issues or are broken and living in poverty with single mothers struggling to survive. Many of them are clearly crying out for help, and we owe it to them to listen.

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Stupid people are still dangerous, so laugh, but be ready to defend yourself.

Woke people are stupid, and stupid people are funny.

Woke people are funny. They are funny because they are stupid, and stupid people are funny. I insist upon this. If it becomes necessary, and if God grants me the courage, I will insist upon laughter right up until I am in the stocks or whatever modern equivalent these sniveling putzes dream up. When they march me out or lock me up or come for my head, I will laugh.

Recently when I expressed this sentiment online I was rebuked: “Nazis were hilarious until they weren’t.” “Stupid with power is not funny anymore.” I want to take these objections seriously enough to answer them, because I think they express a real and growing anxiety. It is an understandable anxiety for anyone who sees how dark things could get in this country and around the world.

The upshot of the objection is: critical race theory and woke doctrine are no longer any laughing matter. We sniggered at the Leftists while they worked diligently away, and now they have taken over our schools and our government. They are seriously engaged in bringing the country down around our ears. In the process, they are doing terrible harm to us and our children. This is nothing to be scoffed at.

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The Appeal of the New Totalitarians.

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom.

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote?

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.)

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.

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Battlefield ‘Burbs

America’s political future turns on our last contestable places.

America’s political culture has been shaped by its rural and urban environments, each of which tends to be dominated by one party. Urban Republicans are now as rare as rural Democrats.

Yet the political future of the country lies in the suburban and exurban rings that dominate every metropolitan region. These voters are made up predominately neither of woke city hipsters nor gun-toting rubes, the stereotypes that dominate our competing cultural memes. The suburbs are the last contestable geography in the country.

Since 1950, suburban population growth has expanded more than ten times faster than core cities. Overall, suburb-dwellers account for more than half the population of the country, and 90 percent of the overall population of metropolitan America. Over the past decade, they have accounted for well over four-fifths of all new job growth (and the vast majority of all new patents). As one political analyst put it, “Suburbs are the new Florida.”

These trends were expanding before the pandemic, but as realtors attest, Covid has accelerated city residents’ movement to suburbs. Manhattan and San Francisco rents have been falling some, but prices in the periphery have been rising. A new national poll from the Los Angeles Times and Reality Check Insights, held after the November 2020 election, found that most residents of big cities want to relocate.

The American Enterprise Institute has found that less dense areas are now growing much faster than denser ones. Critically, millennials, once seen as drawn to urban lifestyles, were already ditching the big city before the pandemic, notes Brookings. A May Zillow survey suggests “space seekers” are leading the charge—millennials and younger Americans, according to Gallup and others, who want to get married and have children, and are following the widely dissed home preference patterns of their parents in order to do so.

Suburbs are also becoming more reflective of the nation’s ethnic diversity. In the 1960s and 1970s suburbs were considered largely white enclaves; but during the past decade, notes Brookings’ Bill Frey, the percentage of suburbanites living in predominantly white suburbs fell from 51 percent to 39 percent.More than a third of the 13.3 million new suburbanites between 2000 and 2010 were Hispanic, with whites accounting for a mere fifth of suburban growth in that same period. African Americans have been steadily moving from inner cities, where many middle income areas have declined due to economic collapse, crime or, in some cases, gentrification. Today, in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, 44 percent of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent non-white.

Competitive Politics in Rural and Urban America

Besides their numerical importance in elections, suburbs are the last redoubts of competitive politics. Both rural America and the core city have become increasingly dominated by political extremes. This does not mean there are no progressives in small towns, or Republicans in big cities, but voting patterns have become more lopsided.

Republicans now totally dominate the politics of small towns and rural areas. Yet as recently as 2008 Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties; eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely ten percent. Last year, rural and small-town voters supported Donald Trump by a remarkable 47 percentage points, well above the 30 percent margin for John McCain eight years earlier. Pockets of past rural liberal populism, like Montana and North Dakota, are becoming crimson red. The biggest exceptions are found in “amenity” areas, such as Vermont, that draw on metropolitan refugees. Sixty of the seventy most rural districts nationwide are represented by Republicans.

Cities, largely devoid of Republicans, have undergone an equally thorough transformation. Less than three decades ago the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, were governed by Republicans while Houston, Philadelphia, and Denver were run by business-oriented Democrats. Now big cities are dominated increasingly by left wing progressives. They produce few Republican elected officials and vanishingly few congresspeople. By one recent account, only one of the 34 most urban Congressional districts is represented by a Republican.

On the Presidential level, lockstep voting approaches Soviet levels. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan garnered 31 percent of the vote in San Francisco, while winning 27.4 percent in Manhattan and over 38 percent in Brooklyn. By 2012, Mitt Romney, a more moderate Republican, won barely 13 percent of the vote in San Francisco, and he garnered less than half of Reagan’s share 28 years earlier in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Donald Trump did even worse in all these areas, winning barely ten percent of San Francisco and Manhattan, and barely 18 percent in Brooklyn.

The Last Ideological Battlefield

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The fall of Chile is a warning to America

Back in the 1970s, the nation of Chile embarked on one of the boldest sets of free market economic reforms in history. The government called in the Chicago Boys, as they were called, led by Milton Friedman and other University of Chicago free market economists.

They were given a free hand to redesign the Chilean economic system with property rights, a low flat tax, privatization of the Social Security system, and industry deregulation. In 1991, Friedman wrote that Chile now has “the three freedoms: economic freedom, political freedom, and human freedom. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it.”

For four decades, the experiment worked better than anyone could have imagined. According to a study by economist Axel Kaiser for the Cato Institute: “Between 1975 and 2015 per capita income in Chile quadrupled to $23,000, the highest rate in Latin America (CNP 2016). As a result, from the early 1980s to 2014, poverty fell from 45 percent to 8 percent (CNP 2016).” Chile became one of the wealthiest nations in South America. And it happened in three decades, an eye blink of history.

The Marxists and intellectual class of Latin America always hated the free market reforms. They disparaged the Chicago boys as “fascists.” They spent decades attacking the policies (with the stooges in the American media echoing their protests) even as Chile became the jewel of South America.

The Marxists invented a narrative of “inequality,” “the rich were getting richer, and the poor were getting poorer,” and capitalism is evil.

They infiltrated all of Chile’s cultural institutions: the media, the schools, the universities, the Catholic Church, the arts, the unions, and even the corporate boardrooms. They spread their poisonous creed of collectivism to the populace.

Is any of this sounding familiar to our situation today?

Eventually, the leftists pulled off a political coup. In 2013, the Left won the Chilean presidency. The free market reforms were systematically replaced with “spread the wealth” platitudes. In October 2020, voters approved a rewrite of the constitution, and now property rights and the rule of law are in danger.

Chile is now in economic free fall. The poor are getting crushed. The rich are pulling their money out of the country. They have arrived at “equality.” Nearly everyone is suffering.

Meanwhile, back in America, we have an economic transformation of our own going on. The Biden administration promises to help the middle class by handing out trillions of dollars of free money to citizens and paying people more money for not working than working. We will borrow trillions of dollars and pray that the Chinese continue to buy up our bonds and that our currency holds up.

Many of our constitutional protections and congressional rules of behavior, such as the filibuster, which protects the rights of the minority, may be headed to the shredder. The election laws are getting rewritten to benefit, significantly, the party now in power — the Democrats. The House has passed a bill requiring millions of working-class people to join unions and pay dues. The Left is saying, don’t worry, this compulsion is going to help the working class. Sure.

A sock-it-to-the-rich tax increase is coming that will make the productive class and the job creators pay their “fair share” with tax rates of 50%, 60%, and 70%.

Will this story have a happy ending?

The answer to that question might be contained in the frightening example of what happened in Chile. It is what our children and college students should be learning in the classrooms — fat chance. The Left runs our schools now, too.

I and others think the comparison is closer to today’s commie China with its fascist corporatism than Hungary was back then, but whatever..

Comment O’ The Day:
“The people who told us that the election of Donald Trump would usher in 1984 are busily ushering in 1984.” Dr. Maturin

The culture curators want to think for you.

Sandor Mecs was a child when his family lived in the town of Szentendre, Hungary. Today, it is a picturesque town 20 miles north of Budapest that is lined with winding cobblestone streets, colorful centuries-old homes, cottages, and churches and is a tourism center with its flourishing museums, charm, and proximity to the capital.

While the picturesque footprint was the same for Mecs and his family and thousands of other Hungarians 60 years ago, life in post-World War II Hungary was anything but ideal if you were a free thinker.

“At that time, we had become a Stalinized state of the Soviet Union, and Matyas Rakosi ruled the country for over seven years as a dictator who demanded no one strayed from the collective approved government thought,” he said.

If you did, you disappeared.

“Everything in government was militarized, and everything in our culture, the arts, the media, where you shopped, was all part of the government,” he explained.

There was no freedom of thought. You believed what the government and, by default, culture and new organizations told you to believe.

The government force was so oppressive that it established a secret police called the AVH, or the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, to make sure everyone thought the same and that no one dissented from whatever the government believed. Mecs explained, “My parents and family members lived in fear of people overhearing a conversation that might deviate from accepted thought.”

He said his father understood that after the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 failed, it was time to flee the family’s home country.

“You have to understand when you leave, you leave everything behind, whether it is family members, belongings, or the roof over your head,” he said. “A week after the revolution, my dad realized we’ve got to get out of here, and we literally snuck across the border with Austria in the dead of night.”

Back then, there were people who, for money, would get you safely across the border. “They were taking groups of maybe 20 people at a time and getting them past the barbed wire. One of the border guards actually caught the group that we were in when a very familiar face caught his eye,” he said.

It was the guard’s sister, “so he let us go,” he said.

Within a short period, over 200,000 men, women, and children escaped their homeland, much like the Mecs family did. It was an exodus and scattered much of the educated and intellectual class. The only people who could afford to leave managed to spread globally, with many of them going to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Many intellectuals in the U.S. toss around the word “dictatorship” or “dictator” about political parties they don’t like frequently, and with such abandon, it is now deemed normal in some circles to use the terms without irony, primarily when referring to the Republican Party.

In their zeal to dismantle conservatism, they miss the true dictator in our country. They are our cultural curators. The corporations, much of the media, the entertainment industry, major league sports organizations, academia, and Silicon Valley all demand that we fall in line with how they think. They want to approve of how we speak, what books we read, what movies we watch, what words we use, who we support politically, how we educate our children, and what parts of history are acceptable to teach.

Many of these entities have gone from trying to appeal to a wide range of customers based on the products they sell or services they offer into social justice organizations, far removed from their core missions and their consumers.

When one of them deems something unacceptable in its version of the world, many others follow suit, often crumbling to their younger employees’ demands. The latter has been given enough power in this age of corporate social justice to destroy the very place they work if that corporation does not bend to their demands.

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We got where we are by being quiet and polite

 No More Silence Now.

I apologize for what I’m about to do. No truly, because no one deserves this ear worm. But it’s time to shout.

Shout, shout, let it all out.

Seriously.

This was brought about by an article from Glenn Reynolds who says that despite the fact none of us agrees with woke BS, a tiny minority is succeeding in silencing the majority.

He’s right on that. what he’s wrong on is the roots of this: how we got where we are. How the left came to be in control. Why they think they can impose their crazy ideology and that “if anyone opposes it” (And I guarantee that’s how they look at it) it’s just “Some uneducated rednecks.” How we got to the point when the left is completely ignorant of history or really anything and trying to recreate the cultural revolution because they feel no one will oppose them.

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St. George Tucker, a member of the Continental Congress, an officer in the Virginia militia during the revolution, and a professor at the College of William and Mary, before becoming a state and then federal judge, wrote a book about the Constitution, where he observed that people in government  were working as hard as possible to evade its restrictions almost before the ink was dry.
Is it within reason to legitimately conclude that the Constitution was ‘inadequate’ from the start?
Could be……….

BLUF:
If morality is the defining quality for our form of self-government, we may no longer be qualified to self-govern.  The Framers understood this.  Our new immorality is the prescription for the constitutional system to fail.  It is not that society cannot be formed by immoral people.  It certainly can.  However, that society’s governance will reflect the people’s (im)morality, and that rule will be centered on command and control without a moral basis.  It will be tyranny.

Are we still a moral people capable of self-governance?

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams

John Adams was not alone in understanding that our Constitution functions only if people have a shared morality derived from Judeo-Christian principles.  James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government”; otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”  It’s not clear that 21st-century America has that necessary virtue.

The Ten Commandments are at the center of Judeo-Christian moral teaching.  (I have written before about the connection of virtue and morality as it relates to First and Second Amendment rights.)  Even non-religious people once understood that these principles are useful guides for moral living in a functioning society.  Much has changed in just a few years, though.

The first few commandments are about man’s relationship with God and are not relevant to this discussion.  What matters here are the commandments that concern our relationships with others, which define morality as our Framers understood it.  They have societal value independent of the precepts about the relationship to God.  No religious beliefs are necessary to accept their value as moral principles.  It was this morality that the Framers saw as essential to constitutional self-government.

Today, many on the left no longer consider these principles a standard for moral behavior.  They have become a standard to avoid.  A significant part of our society believes we should actively defy the moral truth of these principles.  This belief has serious political implications.

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You’re Not Trans. You’re Just Weird:

Editor’s note: This hypothetically open letter was originally posted by its anonymous author on Medium and was rapidly removed as “hate speech.” We found it to be a refreshing dose of honesty, a charming and relatable open letter from one parent to other parents (not to the child, obviously!) about dealing with a challenging and dangerous moment in raising children, especially “weird” adolescents who search for their identities harder than others and risk making life-damaging mistakes in a way never before possible. We are reposting it here on New Discourses with the permission of the author.

by Donna M.

My dear, sweet, son,

I’ve got to break it to you: you’re not trans, you’re just weird.

This seems like a cruel thing to point out right now. Clearly, you are struggling and feeling pretty awful about things. I can see that you are in a rough patch, and one of the first rules of parenting is to not pile on. The world is pretty heavy on your shoulders. You’re fifteen. There’s a pandemic going on. But here I come anyway. I’m about to throw more on you.

When you were two ­– a happy, chubby, little tyke in pull-ups, you watched the world with wary eyes behind the thumb in your mouth. You leapt with joy in the rhythm of the toddle music classes. You chattered and shared stories about your stuffed animals. You loved your little sister. Enjoyed cookies and finger painting. That was all pretty normal.

But you also started to count to one thousand on our walks. And you started to call out the store names as we drove around. And you preferred reading books rather than playing with the other two-year-olds at preschool. And you hated sitting in the circle when instructed. And you hated the feel of blue jeans. And you threw big tantrums when you lost any kind of game. In other words, you started to show signs that you were… weird.

The grandparents were the first to notice. They said gentle things like “You oughta keep an eye on that one,” and sent us links to Wall Street Journal articles about child prodigies. And then the other parents in the play groups started to comment; “He’s pretty intense, huh?” And the teachers were on to it pretty quickly. They started to use fancy terms like “asynchronous development.”

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The best interpretation of “woke” is as a synonym for “crazy, stupid, and vicious”.

When Will the Woke Go Full Caligula?

The other day, I was scrolling through Twitter when I happened upon this particular tweet, directed against the former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss:

“Imagine if @bariweiss offered 10% of the defense she gives white supremacy to all the antifascist, Jewish-allied, Black and brown women of color she has made a career putting in danger,” it said. “NYT staff of color felt so unsafe around her that she had to resign.”

Something about this tweet struck me instantly: it was completely insane. No thinking person can hold that Weiss is anything but a political moderate with no sympathies whatsoever for white supremacism and neither the power nor the desire to harm anyone.

I also understood, however, the likely motivation behind the attack: Weiss has recently emerged as a strident voice against cancel culture and the amorphous but potent phenomenon known as “Woke.”

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A BADGER AMONG KITTENS BY DENTON SALLE

Certain stories make the rounds about wild animals that get mistaken for pets.  It can be someone from another country trying to pick up a skunk because it looks like a cat, a coyote or bear cub thought to be a stray dog, or a feral dog left alone with a house cat.  The stories never end well.  Once of the worse I heard (and some of these are true) was a young woman who found a badger cub and thought it a lost kitten so she took it home and put it in the basket with her kittens.  Whether true or not, it makes a good model for a multicultural society that has scrapped the idea of a common culture, particularly when that culture ignores the differences between classes and ethnic groups for the simplistic broad groupings of race and sex.  Whether you realize it or not, there are badgers in the basket.

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