Right-Wing Plutocrats Finance Progressivism

On Ken Griffin's obscenely wasteful gift to Harvard

Hedge fund mogul and status-conscious sucker Kenneth C. Griffin

Here’s an insightful piece by Ross Douthat on why the $300 million gift to Harvard from Kenneth Griffin, a super-rich GOP donor, ticked off both the Left and the Right. The Left got mad because Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, hardly needs the money, and they think Harvard is laundering the reputation of a vile Republican. The Right got mad because come on Ken, don’t you understand that Harvard is where they manufacture elites who despise everything you supposedly stand for?!?

Douthat (a Harvard grad) said that even by the generous standards of supporting “ineffective altruism,” this gift is indefensible. More:

The sheer unimaginativeness makes Griffin’s gift a useful case study in one important ingredient in our society’s decadence: the absence of ambition or inventiveness among of our insanely wealthy overclass when it comes to institution building. There was a time when American plutocrats actually founded new institutions instead of just pouring money into old ones that don’t need the cash. And for the tycoon who admires that old ambition but thinks playing Leland Stanford is too arduous these days, there are plenty of existing schools that could be revived and reconfigured, made competitive and maybe great, with the money that now flows thoughtlessly into the biggest endowments.

What would Ken Griffin’s $300 million have done for the fledgling University Of Austin? Maybe he could have promised it to Florida’s New College, towards Gov. DeSantis’s goal of making it into a Hillsdale of the Sunshine State. I don’t know if Griffing is a man of faith, but he could have endowed a constellation of classical Christian schools around the country with that money. Think of the different ways he could have upheld and advanced the Western tradition with that money. Hire an army of Joshua Katzes, driven out of academia by the woke Jacobins, and put them to work in endowed chairs at non-crazy universities.

But no: he gave it to Harvard.

Douthat says the symbolism of the gift is bad for the Left (can progressivism really be at peace with plutocracy), but much worse for the Right:

Liberalism’s increasingly upper-class identity undermines the economic left, but at least progressives can expect a substantial alignment between their ideals and what their donors want to fund. Maybe rich Democrats aren’t down with the socialist revolution, but they’re onside, indeed sometimes to the left of Democratic voters, on a range of issues that progressive activists are passionate about, like climate and racism and abortion rights. You wouldn’t need to worry, as a progressive, that a big Elizabeth Warren donor would also be giving money to Christopher Rufo or the Heritage Foundation, the Southern Baptist Convention or The Daily Wire. Whereas many Republican donors are either indifferent or actively hostile to the binding cultural commitments of the right — which is why they can be entirely comfortable supporting the institutions of cultural liberalism with one hand even as they try to influence Republican politicians with the other.

Says Douthat, glumly:

And for conservatives who’d prefer some kind of positive agenda, the reality that much of the money in their coalition doesn’t give a fig about those aspirations is a bitter pill indeed.

It really is. In the piece, Douthat quotes Julius Krein saying that the GOP donor class really only wants a Republican Party that restrains the wilder progressives among the Democrats. In the comments section, I’d like to read y’all’s serious suggestions for how that $300 million could have been better spent. I’d like to know what you think about education, or education-adjacent projects, but you can also talk about media and culture. Think of what that money could have done to create an outlet for serious conservative cultural journalism, or strengthen one or more of those we have. I’m about to head out to have lunch with Chris Rufo. Think of what $300 million to create an institution that does what Rufo does, and more than that, that also works to educate American youth in the best aspects of our history and culture?

America Does Not Need Better PR

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warns that the US is losing global influence:

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned of “troubling” signs that the US is losing global influence as other powers align together and win favor among nations not yet aligned.

“There’s a growing acceptance of fragmentation, and — maybe even more troubling — I think there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with,” Summers said on Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” with David Westin.

Summers was speaking on the sidelines of the spring meeting of global finance chiefs in Washington, where the key theme has been a warning about “fragmentation” of the world economy as the US and rich-world allies aim to reshape supply chains away from China and other strategic competitors.

“Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘what we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture,’” said Summers, a Harvard University professor and paid contributor to Bloomberg TV.

I’ve been telling y’all that, haven’t I? People overseas love a lot of things about the US, but they’re sick of our government being a woke bully.

Former Defense chief Robert Gates is as blind as a bat. He thinks that America just needs better public relations, writing in a Washington Post op-ed:

Our advantage over the Soviet Union in strategic communications during the Cold War was that the USIA and our radio broadcasters such as Voice of America simply told the truth. We must continue to do so. However, in those days we had eager audiences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. The global audience today is more skeptical, so we must develop new approaches to effectively deliver our message.

The solution is not to re-create the USIA — the world has moved on. But a number of measures can be taken to dramatically improve the current lamentable state of affairs, some strategic, others operational. Many of them the president could implement immediately, while others would require congressional action.

First and foremost, the White House and State Department should develop a global engagement plan for strategic communications to explicitly advance U.S. national security interests. This plan should include a road map for engagement with foreign publics and leaders focused especially on sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Underpinning this plan should be a significant expansion of people-to-people exchange programs that send American musicians, sports figures and artists abroad and bring foreign college students to the United States, with government support for private efforts in these areas.

Look, wokeness is not the whole story here. I know that. But it’s a big part of the story. Outside the West, most of the world wants little or nothing to do with the LGBT part of it— but since the second Obama administration (and not, as far as I can tell, repealed by the Trump interregnum), the US has officially made advancing LGBT interests a foreign-policy priority. Back in 2015 or 2016, I posted documents sent to me by a reader who had recently been in official training before heading overseas on a Fulbright scholarship. The reader said all the Fulbrighters were subjected to a day of training and instruction in how their job was to be ambassadors for LGBT rights. It offended the reader, a scholar who simply wanted to do scholarly work, but who was also headed to a Third World country where that kind of advocacy was profoundly insulting to the locals, and could even get the Fulbrighter in trouble.

But that’s how the Woke-American community is: they know what the world needs, and they’re going to give it to them hard. The other day, I was at an event talking to a couple of expat Americans who live and travel in Eastern Europe. They were talking about how much goodwill America has, but how we are slowly pissing it away by forcing the peoples of this region to accept American social liberalism, NOW. I mentioned how resentful Hungarians are of this, and of things like USAID Administrator Samantha Power coming over to Budapest recently, to announce that America is spending $20 million to “promote democracy” — as if people here cannot clearly see that Washington hates democracy when it does not result in outcomes Washington likes.

Bob Gates is by all accounts a very intelligent man. I wonder if he’s so old, and so inside the bubble, that he can’t see that America’s problem in the multipolar world is not that it doesn’t tell its story well. It’s the story itself. America is not the same country it was even 20 years ago. I don’t think many people around the world look to Russia or China as a model. But then, they look at the United States and see an increasingly dysfunctional society that, among other things, is sexually mutilating its children, and is governed by an administration whose government openly and actively wants to spread that mind disease worldwide. There’s not enough PR expertise in the world to make that palatable to sensible people anywhere.

Paul Kingsnorth: Where Transgenderism Is Leading

When I was in Romania last weekend, I stumbled across a transcription of a lecture Paul Kingsnorth gave in that country last year. It’s in Romanian on a Romanian Orthodox website, but my Chrome browser automatically translated it into English. In the talk, Kingsnorth warned the Romanians that transgenderism was coming for them too, and that they had better be ready for it. What I like about this presentation is that there’s nothing right-wing about it. In fact, within living memory, the things Paul talks about here would have been perfectly consonant with a kind of Wendell Berry left-wing mode of thought, especially his warning about how capitalism is endorsing gender ideology as a way to create new markets for surgery and products. Excerpt:

We could summarize this argument as follows: the transgender movement that presents itself to us today as a "struggle for civil rights" is, in fact, something else. By divorcing "gender" from sex, promoting multiple "identities" in the young and vulnerable, by suggesting that the given body is a problem to be solved, and by asserting that our "identity", even our biology, is not our nature, but they are constructs of our minds – we are witnessing the last stage of modernity's long rebellion against created nature.

This rebellion currently manifests itself as a well-funded and well-organized attempt to normalize a sterilized, post-biological humanity in which male and female, mother and father, family, and ultimately nature become notions " problematic". What is the logical end of this process of separating biology from sex, and body from mind? We can see it clearly enough if we choose to look things in the face. And some prominent transgender activists aren't shy about speaking out about it.

 Take the example of Martine (formerly Martin) Rothblatt, billionaire transgender businesswoman and prominent technocrat. In his 2011 book From Transgender to Transhuman : A Manifesto On the Freedom Of Form, the destination of this movement is explicit . "Transgenderism," writes Rothblatt, "is the ramp to transhumanism." Rothblatt presents the desire to transcend the "gender binary" as part of the larger process of transcending all naturally existing boundaries. Abandoning gender will lead to the abandonment of sex and ultimately to the complete abandonment of the body.

More:

The real problem is that a generation of hyper-urbanized, hyperactive, increasingly alienated from nature, growing up in a psychologized anti-culture with introverted tendencies, is being led to conclude that biology is "a problem that can be overcome", that their body is "a form of oppression" and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns or even invasive surgery to nanotechnology, "cyber consciousness software" and, perhaps eventually, towards the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

Where will this lead? Time will tell, but perhaps we should leave the last word to another transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, who sees in the future a world in which the body – disordered, limited, aged, sexualized, generator of all our vulnerabilities – is abolished : “We're going to have a conflict between who merges with the AI ​​and who doesn't. It will probably be some kind of civil war. Eventually, humans will not be able to stop progress, and most will upload to new worlds where they will not die and no longer have to work or live as suffering biological beings. You will relinquish control over your life, and that will be the price of existing in this world. It will be a quasi-perfect world, full of happiness and progress."

Reader, you must not buy the line that this is nothing more than a “civil rights” story. Back in the mid-2000s, when the gay marriage activists were saying that all they wanted was to shift the definition of marriage slightly to include them, people like me warned that this was a trap — that there was no way to do that without legitimating trans. This might not have seemed obvious, because homosexuality is not the same thing as transgenderism, despite what activists claimed.

The reason is that in order to make same-sex marriage legitimate, you had to deny that sexed bodies were relevant. “Love is love” entails the belief that the legitimacy, the normativity, or married love rests solely in the subjective feelings of the lovers. If that is true, then on what grounds do you deny marital status to threesomes, or other polygamous arrangements? There are no strong grounds, which is why I am certain I will live to see legal polygamy in parts of America. And if that is true — if sexed bodies don’t matter — then it’s not hard to see how you slide into gender fluidity from that position. In fact, that is exactly what happened. But you were a bigot and a scaremonger for pointing it out back then. Hence my coming up with the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

Kingsnorth doesn’t get into the homosexual aspect of all this. He focuses on the trans phenomenon as a primary front of techno-capitalism’s War On Nature, and on natural limits. It’s very much worth thinking in this mode. Transgenderism is well on its way to becoming normalized everywhere (it already is in Blue America, and in blue-dominated institutions), and if that happens, there are no strong obstacles to transhumanism.

And we wonder why much of the world looks with skepticism at the American story…

NYT: Anti-Trans Is A Culture War Ginned Up By GOP

For a perfect example of how the Regime’s media servants frame history ideologically, look no further than this story from The New York Times the other day, in which the paper’s reporters construed conservative resistance to pro-trans initiatives as a cynical attempt by the Right to raise money by attacking poor, put-upon trans people. Excerpt:

As a result, conservatives went looking for a new approach to the issue. Mr. Schilling’s organization, for instance, conducted polling to determine whether curbing transgender rights had resonance with voters — and, if they did, the best way for candidates to talk about it. In 2019, the group’s research found that voters were significantly more likely to support a Republican candidate who favored a ban on transgender girls participating in school sports — particularly when framed as a question of whether “to allow men and boys to compete against women and girls” — than a candidate pushing for a ban on transgender people using a bathroom of their choosing.

With that evidence in hand, and transgender athletes gaining attention, particularly in right-wing media, conservatives decided to focus on two main fronts: legislation that addressed participation in sports and laws curtailing the access of minors to medical transition treatments.

The unstated premise here is that absent well-funded right-wing campaigns, everyone would have been just fine with biological males invading women’s sports, and minors — sometimes with schools having secretly coached them — seeking permanent sterilization, and surgical mutilation of breasts or male genitalia. The real culture war, you see, is failing to accept whatever new thing the cultural Left comes up with. To defend what you have is bigotry, is backwardness, is evidence of malice. This is how the Regime media gaslight us all.

Think back to Bob Gates saying that America just needs to tell its story more effectively. The Democratic-led US Government (and the Regime media) calls Hungary undemocratic and authoritarian because it declines to affirm the Washington-NYC-Brussels view of the world. These are the same people who say that those who won’t affirm transgenderism are malicious right-wing cynics. It’s all gaslighting. All of it.

Against Critical Race Theory? RACIST!

Speaking of false media narratives, the New Orleans Times-Picayune seems to be smearing the Louisiana Republican Party with this report:

Louisiana Republican Party officials want state lawmakers to forbid the study of racism at colleges and universities, arguing in a resolution approved Saturday that classes examining "inglorious aspects" of United States history are too divisive.

The resolution, passed by voice vote with no discernible dissent at the state party's quarterly meeting in Baton Rouge, asks the Legislature to pass laws removing diversity, equity and inclusion departments and agencies "within any institution of higher learning within the state." Without citing evidence, the resolution asserts that these programs have bloated budgets and inflamed political tensions on campuses.

But if you read on in the story, you see that the Republicans are not at all proposing to forbid “the study of racism”; it’s all about Critical Race Theory and DEI programs. That’s a very, very big difference! One more example of why it’s impossible to trust the media when it comes to reporting on race, sex, or gender.

The Non-Binary Budweiser Gelding

I’ll leave you today on a funny note. Poor old Anheuser-Busch is down about $6 billion from the decision by its Ivy-educated, Manhattan-dwelling, lady vice-president of Bud Light to associate the brand with Gidget — that is, with Dylan Mulvaney, the extremely annoying tranny influencer. They’re trying hard to rebuild their relationship with angry customers. They’ve released this ad, which is “Simpsons”-level self-parodying in its blatant appeal to the proles:

Seriously, watch it. It’s about like the Simpsons ad for the Canyonero. Bud is about Murka, small towns, the Midwest, front porches, flag-raising, country roads, dudes being bros, 9/11, amber waves of grain, shining seas, and, of course, the Budweiser Clydesdale (that poor pony probably had his balls snipped off, and identifies as non-binary). What, no eagles?