The framing of that article was bonkers to me. The NYTimes wants its readers to believe that no one cared about the transgender issue and that transgender activists were simply minding their own business, and then top-down commands came from GOP fundraisers and leadership and all the yokels followed their marching orders. In reality, this was an issue rooted in people's real-world concerns about school policies, women's sports, parental rights, and more—and as you rightly point out, not just concerns by conservatives. It's taken several years for GOP leadership to understand that this is a thing voters care about.
The comments on that article by frustrated liberals are especially worth reading.
Here's an Archive link to that NYT article for those who hit the firewall: https://archive.ph/c2vgd Sorry, no comments are available for viewing on there.
Boy what an odious and ideologically spun article that was! Those terrible conservatives!! Transgender girls aren't being "banned" from "participating in sports". They are being banned from participating in female sports. Because "trans girls" are males. They are not females. DUH.
A lot of Kingsnorth's thoughts regarding the relationship between transhumanism, transgenderism, and the Machine's war against nature -- can be found in the really excellent essay of his "The Abolition of Man (and Woman)" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-abolition-of-man-and-woman
"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."
And to legitimize trans is to legitimize polyamory/polygamy. And to legitimize polyamory is to legitimize other practices that we now consider unthinkable. Because the sexual revolution knows no boundary; this train won't stop until it gets all the way to the end of the line. Which is why you can be certain pedophilia is coming - maybe not tomorrow, or next month, or next year. But it'll be legitimized under the umbrella of LGBT rights - gay teens needing to realize and articulate their "actual" selves, and who better to help them achieve that fulfillment, that validation, than older gays who can help them realize their "true selves?"
In a consumer society where lust is seen as a virtue rather than a vice, when every boundary is oppression, when the overriding individual and thus societal goal becomes the actualization of the "true self" - we want what we want, and we believe we're entitled to it, and to be denied what we want = "pain" "hurt" "violence".
To quote my favorite Vulcan, I agree your position is quite "logical." That said, it is a "zero sum" sort of progression--you assume that Western culture will continue to evolve in the same manner, at some pace, into an infinite future.
I don't share that assumption. I believe that the essential kernel of trans-humanist thinking is actually anti-human thinking. I fully hold that humanity is far and away superior to any other form of life, organic or synthetic (not including The Creator). As such, I believe that Western culture, as currently configured, will implode in violent conflict and conflagration well before any sort of trans-humanist effort is successful. Trans-humanism is a no-go. We will annihilate our civilization first. The subsequent stage of human history may well resemble the Bronze Age, but it will NOT be trans-human.
Hence why we all need to read and implement the Benedict Option, so that new Bronze Age will have a few pockets in which the memory of Western Civilization and Judeo-Christian ideas has been maintained, until the world is ready to hear it again.
I recently re-read the sci-fi book "Canticle for Leibowitz". It motivated me to get more serious about this in my own life.
It is the nature of lust to not be satiated. It just burns. Like white phosphorus or magnesium. Burn, burn, burn white hot.
The homo vampires and woke perverts will not stop. There are no brakes. They yield themselves to hell through a channel that we all have in us: flesh is a conduit to hell. We fight it in the spirit and God enables us to overcome. You yield to it with no reservations and it overcomes and takes possession.
The fiends of hell take delight in disfiguring the face of God’s creation.
They cackle before the gaze of God while, through their design and influence, watch men become addicted to the feces of men. To watch humans bathe in blood and piss like animals. To slice their bodies up and offer a truly horrific mockery of gender as fulfillment of deep need. This is satanic. Be prepared to see compounding perversity. The demons love it. They roll in derision to watch humans defile children, corpses, animals, electrical outlets, sh*t sandwiches, severed goat heads. You name it. Its all one big F-k You to God for them. This is the real shadow govt.
Sadly, the US lost its shine once Bush lied to invade Iraq, upending what has been until then a rather coherent foreign policy. Subsequently bouncing between Obama, Trump and Biden made the US look look like an increasingly unstable partner that can't really be trusted by allies, can't claim the moral high ground and can't pretend to be a model worth emulating. The future is bleak.
It is a fun parlor game to ask your drinking buddies "When did USA fail?" Methinks that occurred long before GW Bush.
Two clever answers float to the top of mind:
1) When Eve took that bite of the Apple. Humanity is broken, sinful, and will ALWAYS fail in one way or another. There is no escape from ourselves.
2) The election of Woodrow Wilson and the elevation of Progressive politics. Progressivism was the first movement to meaningfully challenge (other than the Confederacy) the legitimacy and authority of the US Constitution. As each wave of Progressive "reform" of the Constitution has been implemented, the Rights of American citizens have been assaulted.
As for a bleak future, I concur, in the short term. Human history is not a straight line of positive evolution as Obama and other Progressives assert. Instead, human cultures ebb and flow. The fall of the highly advanced Roman culture was followed by about 500 years of the "dark ages!" But the Renaissance followed, and the human culture that subsequently developed exceeded that of the Roman world by many orders of magnitude.
The US always had an imperialist streak. See: Manifest Destiny and Mexican War. Also, our invasion of Canada in 1812. For a long while we were limited to our own neck of the woods . In the 20th century we started going global.
A betrayal of almost every principle. Although the Declaration does express support for revolution of the same sort everywhere in the world, a kind of premonition of "democracy promotion" driven by similar values worldwide. I think Franklin's vision was more modest than an eventual United States of the World. Or Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets.
It wasn't an apple in Eden though. Although LGBTQ aligned Apple Computer's logo is an apple with a bite out of it. The iPhone as the beginning of the knowledge of evil? Our goose is Tim Cook'ed.
9/11 and the Rise of the Neocons. I laugh when the ignorant youngsters say that Trump was the Worst President Evah. If only! And the US itself was never the same after 911 and the War on Terror. Obama had a chance to set things right but his admin just became Bush's 3rd and 4th terms instead.
China is getting old before it gets rich. It's unlikely to be "the" future either. The most likely outcome is a multi-polar world, the normal situation throughout history.
The empire might well be expanding while all these ills take place. Cruel empires often succeed for a time through evil. We're a sentimental people, sentimental, and evil, to borrow a phrase from Dostoyevsky.
Yes, Empires have a shelf life of about 500 years. Then, they collapse under the weight of their own hubris. Our "empire" is more specifically the Western post-Reformation cultural epoch.
I agree with JonF on this one. (Wow, pigs have flown, Jon!)
China will be old before it can become powerful. They'll be a challenge in the 20's and 30's, but the rest of 21st century belongs to someone slightly south of them. India.
"On the video, thanks! Here was one comment that I found particularly hilarious, from The Classic Dad :
Let me tell you a story.... about a beer company founded in America, then sold to a corporate conglomerate in Europe. They didn't understand their market and tried forcing their woke beliefs on them. The people had enough and stopped buying their product. The company never admitted they screwed up, and the people remembered, continuing to boycott their beer. This wasn't just about beer, this was about people being fed up with being told what and how to think, this is the American spirit."
On the Trans thing:
Lordy!
On Gates's editorial:
Correctamundo! We are in a multi-polar world- Diplomatic discussions engineered by Xi between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Macron goes to China and he and Xi discuss co-op on nuclear energy, etc. (by the way, when PM Orban does anything that is in the national interest of Hungary, the EU and US intelligensia has a come apart. What's been the reaction to this?), etc.
I don't think Foggy Bottom has gotten the memo and instead they wag their finger at the rest of the world and increasingly the rest of the world gives US the finger.
P. S.- in addition to Hungarians being insulted about the 20 mil gift from Ms. Powers, implying there is no free press in Hungary, it would be nice if she addressed the insulted U. S. citizens on the issue of all those FISA warrant requests originating with her log-in details. Wow! Wouldn't that be a nice journalism story? Actually it would be nice if we didn't spend US money on such negative activities and instead worked on, oh, maybe clean water for East Palestine, Ohio.
All the CEO of Bud had to say was: "We understand that we alienated millions of our fellow Americans, many of whom are our customers. We're sorry we did that. Dylan Mulvaney has every right to live his life as he chooses, and we would love it if he drinks a Bud occasionally, but we made a mistake by making him an unofficial mascot of our company. Men are men. Women are women. We respect them both, but we can't do that without respecting the inherent differences between them. And we just fired the woman who made this disastrous decision."
That would have fixed this. He couldn't bring himself to do it.
Regarding American dysfunction, I've had people from both Serbia and Croatia tell me in the last 6 months that America feels like late-80s Yugoslavia, right before all hell broke loose.
The US is not at all like Yugoslavia, a nation stitched together out of six distinct ethnic groups some of whom had major historical grievances against each other. The closest thing to that in US would be the Europeans against the Native Americans, but there are not enough of the latter and they do not live in a separate region of their own, nor are they of one cultural or language group.
I think that's whistling past the graveyard. It's certainly true that America is not nearly as fractious as Yugoslavia. But the post-Civil Rights racial settlement, where we tried to be a color blind nation, has been destroyed by the Left, the fools.
I think you are myopic, Rod, if you cannot see how the alt-Right (and more broadly the "race-realist" right) has also worked to tear down the post-Civil Rights settlement. But it's my experience that there are simply not enough people passionate about these issues to create actual civil war: the overwhelming majority of us want the crazies, on both sides, to sit down and shut up. If anyone crosses the line into violence they will unite the populous in outrage against them, much as Tim McVeigh did. I think that your view is badly skewed by a selection effect: you hear very disproportionately from people who are among the crazies including the leftwingers who bash you mercilessly.
In the 1990's I blamed the Republican Party, under people like Newt Gingrich, of doing the very thing you are talking about, working to tear down the post-Civil Rights settlement. Of course, there were people on the left calling the whole post-Civil Rights settlement into question. But they were held in check by the more centrist Democrats, including people like Bill Clinton. I foolishly thought that Barack Obama would do the same. Instead, especially in his second term, he took a page from Gingrich, using race as a wedge issue to increase his political power.
I don't see how Obama used the race card. Claims about that are one more piece pf evidence that I live in a different timeline than some others here. I also don't think Gingrich, though an egotistical blow hard, was all that bad on the racial front.
Just Obama picking on that Cambridge MA in 2009 cop shows the sort of man he is. Like most on the Left, Obama hates everything about America pre-1960. I bet he especially enjoyed the statues of Lee, Jackson and Columbus getting torn down. Obama's a scoundrel.
Jon, in my very "blue" suburban DC school system, MLK-style "colorblindness" is considered insulting to non-white people. It's literally in the yearly HR trainings. Tell people "I treat everyone equally regardless of race" and you get sneered at and lectured about "equity." The tearing-down of the post civil rights settlement has been institutionalized in HR departments and school systems, and for all the alt-right's other faults, they're not the ones to blame for this.
I think you can make a case for means-tested benefits-- special help for people from low income strata and anyone devastated by unusual circumstances. Treating everyone absolutely equal in a completely "blind" way leads to "The law in its majesty forbids both the rich and poor from sleeping under bridges"
I simply don’t know how I’m supposed to live with people who are okay with abortion access through birth and with the mutilation of kids as they go through the normal process of growing up, and find racism, sexism, and all the other kinds of isms under every rock and around every corner.
I’m tired of politicians who actively hate my country and her people and demand that I hate her and her history too.
It wasn’t a majority that fought the in Revolution and the Civil War. But enough people did organize and called out wrong.
It gives me a headache every time I read or listen to a Leftist these days because it’s just words that have no actual content in them - which the AB response was a perfect example of. It said stuff and there were a lot of words, but most of it is just meaningless, Like they are trying to come up with enough words to get the essay finished and meet the length requirement, so the teacher doesn’t mark them down. I was not impressed by the AB response at all. That’s what their entire statement sounded and felt like high school like to me.
We want to lay low, but even my husband (who’s not into guns) is talking about going to learn to shoot. I don’t care if it’s called ‘negative energy’ or just plain evil. Something bad is coming for America. 🙏🏻📿.
Hope you and your family have a blessed Easter season. He is risen! Hope you feel better too!
There are many people on the right like your father who never accepted the idea of a "color blind" country. My own father is another one. I grew up in Prince George's County MD in the bussing era fifty years ago. The cultural conflicts were enormous. Both racesd seethed at the other. Eventually, virtually all the whites left over a twenty-five year period. Most of Prince George's County is as black as 1960 Anacostia. Black and white cultures are radically different. That's life.
Never trust whistlers by the graveyard. They clearly are up to no good. I mean, I manage and walk in graveyards at all hours. I have strolled in grave yards sober and also wine-stewed at 2am, 4am...under a harvest moon. There is nothing to fear but mountain lions. ...Or psychopaths. The dead never, ever hurt you. Their mouldering bones are as content as a Boddhisatva, I assure you. Whistlers are mercenaries on the way to no good. I have encountered the midnight psychopaths and they are more worrisome than mountain lions. But I swear to you, i deal with them like Obie Wan. You just stay calm. Look at them confidently. Speak with a calm, steady voice and essentially say, “These are not the droids you are looking for”. Keep looking at them in the pause. And they walk. It also helps to be prepared for a knife fight.
I get asked quite frequently if I get scared spending so much time around the dead. My answer is simple and, strangely, catches people by surprise: “The dead are no worry to me. I can smell their status daily and occasionally have to handle their bones. But the so-called “living”...fear them.
Whistling that happy, sappy tune of nothing to see, all continues as it always has. I guess it is a way to preserve a sense of psychological equilibrium while the nation's cities crater.
It’s easy to be ‘color blind’ when you have an 85-90% dominant egalitarian ethnicity. I just don’t find it realistic that we were ever going to be a melting pot or salad; it’s simply not human nature.
To the degree that Yugoslavia was "stitched together," the "stitched-on" parts were Slovenia and Macedonia, which in the early 1990s had a quite minor war (Slovenia) and no war at all (Macedonia). The real bloodshed was in Croatia's Krajina region and in Bosnia, both of which had shared languages but had religiously diverse populations for centuries.
And you bafflingly ignored black-white relations when talking about America's historical grievances. Niccolo Soldo (not the Croat of my original post BTW) has said flat-out that his knowledge of Yugoslavia tells him the USA cannot survive something like the 1619 Project for reasons that should be obvious.
Well, no, Bosnia certainly hadn't been part of Austria-Hungary for centuries, and Croatia had been independent before ever joining Hungary. Plus, talking about colonial background can be considered like saying Florida is still part of Spain or something.
And black-white relations are worse than they were in say 2005. Worth mentioning that the most diverse, sophisticated parts of Bosnia (Sarajevo and Mostar) saw the worst ethnic fighting.
Thank you kindly for the shout out, Jon, but technically the medieval Hungarian influence over Bosnia was very limited, unlike over Croatia, which was directly under the Magyar crown for most of its history. After Hungarian machinations failed, Bosnia was significantly influenced or ruled by Ottomans for about four hundred years, probably their defining historical experience, not neglecting the Serb presence.
Does anybody ever turn down large sums of money? I was watching the other day, Broken Lance, one of those great sweeping 50s Cinematic Epic, with major stars and scene after scene of visual poetry. In one scene, the three villainous brothers offer the favorite son fresh out of prison $10,000 cash and a promise to financially back him for three years so he can make a new start in Oregon, far from their now dead father’s (Spencer Tracy) Empire-like Ranch. The favorite son refuses and tosses the bundled cash into a full spittoon from which another brother retrieves daintily retrieves it, soaked and dripping. I guess my underlying wish is to rejoin every financial decision we make with morality and ethics. I’m not arguing that it’s always wrong to accept financial support. I’m all for patrons, friends and families helping out, subsidies and charity. Even Ayn Rand, the outspoken theorist of !pure Capitalism’ kept all her money in a bank across the street and collected Social Security when she realized her medical expenses undergoing treatment for cancer could impoverish her. I am suggesting that it’s always as good a question as ‘where’s the money going?’ or ‘where should it go?’ is ‘where did the money come from?’ Same question about all the cheap ‘consumer’ goods that fill my shelves and closets as much as anyone’s. I would like to think that there’s at least a little of that jailbird brother (played by a very young Robert Wagner) in me. I’d like to think there’s a little of him in all of us. For me, at least, I wish it were more. I’m no fan of Harvard but I sure would have cheered if they had turned Ken Griffin down flat. They Right would have howled at the ‘virtue signaling’ but those of us who like Martin Luther King see the real division in our Politics as not Right or Left, but Populists and Plutocrats, would have chalked it up as a win. And, the spittoon would have been a nice touch.
Re: People overseas love a lot of things about the US, but they’re sick of our government being a woke bully.
Wokeness has nothing to do with it. They're sick of the US being a self-serving and self-righteous bully period. Something we've been since Teddie Roosevelt vowed to teach our neighbors to choose better leaders.
As for transhumanism, it might make good scifi in capable hands, but it's no more a reality, and won't be, than perpetual motion machines. We may do a lot with these bodies of ours, but we're not leaving them behind-- they are us.
Re: There are no strong grounds, which is why I am certain I will live to see legal polygamy in parts of America.
Maybe, but as I have said before it will come about because of religious liberty litigation by polygynous faiths (e..g, Islam). However: Number is basic category of reality while gender is not. I can imagine unisexual living things (we have those right here on Earth). I cannot imagine a reality where Number does not exist. Meanwhile I am constrained to remind everyone that SSM is a civil institution only: it does not pretend to trespass on marriage as a sacrament or ordinance of the Church. My own preference would still be to have "civil unions for all" leaving marriage to religion but giving the duties and rights part under the law to everyone.
And there is indeed (semi-)legal polygamy in a large group of (supposedly excommunicated) Mormon enclaves scattered throughout the West, from Western South Dakota through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and northern Arizona and Colorado. Been there for over a century. VERY religious: completely patriarchal, the women dress extremely modestly, strict morals (within the frame of polygamy). The twist is that most of the boys born to the colonies are booted out when they hit puberty, because the old men don't want any competition for themselves and their lineage for the girls.
“ Meanwhile I am constrained to remind everyone that SSM is a civil institution only: it does not pretend to trespass on marriage as a sacrament or ordinance of the Church. My own preference would still be to have ‘civil unions for all’ leaving marriage to religion but giving the duties and rights part under the law to everyone.”
That was the solution in France, where it was considered bon ton to refer to the bride as “madamoiselle” until the church wedding. Just wait, J. Father Martin hasn’t broken a sweat yet.
C. S. Lewis (and I) agree with you. From "Mere Christianity":
The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question - how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammendans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.
"My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, and the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought be to quite sharp, so that a man know which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not."
But marriage is essential to a stable society and part of the problem with the mental health of young people are the consequences of divorce in so many of their lives. Marriage should be a priority of nations.
Yes, I realize you are one of the ROCA members who believe that while that church should not perform homosexual "marriages" itself, it ought to sacralize and bless them after.
Fran, I am not replying to you these days because I'd have better luck persuading my cats to become vegans. I don't need the frustration.
But I will call you out when you lie about me or my views. You are doing so above, without one scintilla of evidence. Stop it. Slander is the very name of the Devil!
It's rather presumptuous to say that I'm of the Devil, but understandable after your earlier rant that there's not a scintilla of Christian left in me.
Now all you have to do, is to affirm that you do NOT believe that the church should bless homosexual couplings. You've been coy about it, while making supportive allusions about that, as above. All you have to do is make the simple statement that the church should not bless homosexual relationships. Since you don't believe homosexual behavior is a sin, or if so, unimportant, then I don't expect you to be honest about this but remain in your closet and bide your time until it occurs. Don't evade, be honest and state your real opinion, instead of telling me I'm an incarnation of Satan.
This is why I am not replying to you: I do not need your harassment, as I have too much else going awry these days for this petty aggravation.
I have stated my beliefs many times on SSM and I do not need you to call me to make routine and rote protestations as if I stood before some Grand Inquisitor or Commissar of Ideological Conformity.
The word "Devil" derives from Greek "diabolē", slander, that is the connection I was pointing to.
You have been called out on this blog by other very devout and conservative Christians, not for the substance of your views, but for the ugly attitude with which you hammer them. Maybe some introspection on your part is in order.
Really? So many like to have their cake and eat it too. Like wanting the Orthodox church to bless same sex couplings in opposition to 2000 years of church teaching, while not conducting the "marriage" ceremony itself. Imagine being lowlife for standing for truthfulness, in an age of living by lies. Don't be Woke, wake up.
Wokeness absolutely has something to do with it. We've been exporting multi-culti P.C. claptrap along with democracy for years. Wokeness is simply a stronger variety of what we've already been shipping abroad.
Griffin could have made a huge impact by supporting AR (guv S H Sanders) school choice with prizes for best schools, and especially best schools for low IQ folk. This would be a great time for more Khan Academy self-study with frequent ai & human tests, and human teaching assistants & mentors.
Harvard illegally discriminates against hiring Republicans, professors or staff- the tax exempt status of all such orgs should be revoked.
"Think of what $300 million to create an institution that does what Rufo does"
Spend the money on recruiting and running conservative Republicans nationwide, who will have the best chance to attack the problem more directly by legislatively cleaning up the source of rot in existing institutions. It must be possible somehow, otherwise, you have surrendered Harvard and all the rest. Continuously facing that massive army, hoping to build a counter-army on a shoestring, this is not appealing for the future struggle. At least the state schools should be de-Nazified, to use an inconvenient term, which is inappropriate to the context, since this is a left-wing problem, but I can't help but notice yet again how "de-Communized" doesn't really exist as a trope. Obviously that's because in our collective practical experience, data says that Communists hang on to their jobs. For the the vast majority of those bastards life goes on as if nothing happened, even after things supposedly "change." This is a hard thing to swallow and digest. It's a trend that says something about the pervasiveness of liberalism, perhaps. Progress, motion, evolution, the soft totalitarianism of reason, all that is just the Machine oiling itself, and it has been doing so ever since we first picked up a rock and used it as a tool, or a weapon. (Notice how I'm assuming we're animals. My liberal framework is predisposed to seeing the Machine as human, not demonic. This is a problem, but the point is: solutions exist. My last line of defense: I'm literally multi-cultural.)
Anyway, make the built-in contradictions part and parcel of a renewed and quintessentially American, functionally progressive heroic self-definition, our next global mission: to finally change that shit. We're gonna show the planet how it's done. Let's set a tiny little huge example on how to march triumphantly into the future by firing the postmodernists and other theorists of permanent dissolution, by de-Communizing our institutions. You don't need to hang them in a Nuremberg.
I share in the upset in how Griffin and other uberrich give. I'm well off (NOT uberrich) and give more than the average Joe, and I am very picky about my giving. I have annoyed people and cut off organizations by so doing. (Small examples: I cut off World Vision and World Relief long ago and more recently cut off the Salvation Army when they decided to go woke.) I want to give where it does the most good with a minimum of evil. And if someone doesn't like it, too bad.
I'm not patting myself on the back because that is really what any responsible well-off person should be doing. So just dumping money on the likes of Harvard?? Come on!
Rod wonders why our current class of "uberrich" don't start their own foundations, as did Stanford, Getty, etc. I know the answer. They don't believe in anything sufficiently enough to merit that much of their attention. Jeff Bezos, for example, toys with the Washington Post in an effort to foist his political perspectives on the rest of us. Bezos just built an obscenely BIG yacht too. Call it dick swinging! At rock bottom however, there really isn't anything there....no meaningful objective beyond satisfying his own whims. Bill Gates has his Foundation of course, but it breaks no new ground in terms of philosophy, it simply lavishly funds existing philosophies--in furtherance of his whims.
This moment in history is almost entirely absent of new ideas. Progressives lavish praise on themselves for their rejection of religious Faith, but in that rejection, they have abandoned all sense of creativity.
The Griffin gift and others like it would be better used to assist poorer students at community colleges. Such funds would help these students complete their studies and develop the academic skills that would allow them to succeed in life (or, perhaps, attend a four-year institution). For many, community colleges are the gateway to a better future. More aid from the “billionaire class” could make this a reality for many more deserving students.
You're assuming he cares about those causes. Just because he's a republican donor now doesn't mean he cares about all aspects of the republican agenda. Donating to republicans helps advance some of his agenda as does donating to Harvard. These donations are transactional in nature, the number is massive but not meaningful to his overall wealth.
You remember the great line from "Witness", right? Col. Boris Bykov of Red Army Intelligence, to Whittaker Chambers, whose underground name is "Bob": "Siehst du, Bob, wer auszahlt is der Meister, und wer Geld nimmt muss auch etwas geben." ("Look, Bob, who pays out is the master, and whoever takes the money has to give something.") See what Jared Kushner's daddy got for his Geld? Await developments.
Can’t make a livin’ as a Bogeyman Wrangler if there ain’t no bogeymen. The worst nightmare of the Republican elite is a third party, not a strong and in-power Democrat Party. So why not fuel a Democrat making factory? You don’t get that rich being dumb. You can, though, and not be wise. Exhibit A.
Wise would have been to pump $300Million into vocal education. Electricians, welders, auto mechanics and HVAC techs are the bedrock of society. Their work is hard and good and in great demand. They don’t like paying taxes and they sure don’t tolerate bullshit. Their heads are usually down in their work and weekends but when something grabs their attention they act. (I figured making a fella switch beer brands would be harder, but then again, Lone Star hasn’t yet insulted my breed. Hope they never do.). This rich guy probably doesn’t even see them when he needs them but he’d miss them if they disappeared. And so would we.
The framing of that article was bonkers to me. The NYTimes wants its readers to believe that no one cared about the transgender issue and that transgender activists were simply minding their own business, and then top-down commands came from GOP fundraisers and leadership and all the yokels followed their marching orders. In reality, this was an issue rooted in people's real-world concerns about school policies, women's sports, parental rights, and more—and as you rightly point out, not just concerns by conservatives. It's taken several years for GOP leadership to understand that this is a thing voters care about.
The comments on that article by frustrated liberals are especially worth reading.
Here's an Archive link to that NYT article for those who hit the firewall: https://archive.ph/c2vgd Sorry, no comments are available for viewing on there.
Boy what an odious and ideologically spun article that was! Those terrible conservatives!! Transgender girls aren't being "banned" from "participating in sports". They are being banned from participating in female sports. Because "trans girls" are males. They are not females. DUH.
A lot of Kingsnorth's thoughts regarding the relationship between transhumanism, transgenderism, and the Machine's war against nature -- can be found in the really excellent essay of his "The Abolition of Man (and Woman)" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-abolition-of-man-and-woman
"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."
And to legitimize trans is to legitimize polyamory/polygamy. And to legitimize polyamory is to legitimize other practices that we now consider unthinkable. Because the sexual revolution knows no boundary; this train won't stop until it gets all the way to the end of the line. Which is why you can be certain pedophilia is coming - maybe not tomorrow, or next month, or next year. But it'll be legitimized under the umbrella of LGBT rights - gay teens needing to realize and articulate their "actual" selves, and who better to help them achieve that fulfillment, that validation, than older gays who can help them realize their "true selves?"
In a consumer society where lust is seen as a virtue rather than a vice, when every boundary is oppression, when the overriding individual and thus societal goal becomes the actualization of the "true self" - we want what we want, and we believe we're entitled to it, and to be denied what we want = "pain" "hurt" "violence".
To quote my favorite Vulcan, I agree your position is quite "logical." That said, it is a "zero sum" sort of progression--you assume that Western culture will continue to evolve in the same manner, at some pace, into an infinite future.
I don't share that assumption. I believe that the essential kernel of trans-humanist thinking is actually anti-human thinking. I fully hold that humanity is far and away superior to any other form of life, organic or synthetic (not including The Creator). As such, I believe that Western culture, as currently configured, will implode in violent conflict and conflagration well before any sort of trans-humanist effort is successful. Trans-humanism is a no-go. We will annihilate our civilization first. The subsequent stage of human history may well resemble the Bronze Age, but it will NOT be trans-human.
Hence why we all need to read and implement the Benedict Option, so that new Bronze Age will have a few pockets in which the memory of Western Civilization and Judeo-Christian ideas has been maintained, until the world is ready to hear it again.
I recently re-read the sci-fi book "Canticle for Leibowitz". It motivated me to get more serious about this in my own life.
It is the nature of lust to not be satiated. It just burns. Like white phosphorus or magnesium. Burn, burn, burn white hot.
The homo vampires and woke perverts will not stop. There are no brakes. They yield themselves to hell through a channel that we all have in us: flesh is a conduit to hell. We fight it in the spirit and God enables us to overcome. You yield to it with no reservations and it overcomes and takes possession.
The fiends of hell take delight in disfiguring the face of God’s creation.
They cackle before the gaze of God while, through their design and influence, watch men become addicted to the feces of men. To watch humans bathe in blood and piss like animals. To slice their bodies up and offer a truly horrific mockery of gender as fulfillment of deep need. This is satanic. Be prepared to see compounding perversity. The demons love it. They roll in derision to watch humans defile children, corpses, animals, electrical outlets, sh*t sandwiches, severed goat heads. You name it. Its all one big F-k You to God for them. This is the real shadow govt.
For whites bitching about "demographic decline" wouldn't they want polygamy?
Sadly, the US lost its shine once Bush lied to invade Iraq, upending what has been until then a rather coherent foreign policy. Subsequently bouncing between Obama, Trump and Biden made the US look look like an increasingly unstable partner that can't really be trusted by allies, can't claim the moral high ground and can't pretend to be a model worth emulating. The future is bleak.
It is a fun parlor game to ask your drinking buddies "When did USA fail?" Methinks that occurred long before GW Bush.
Two clever answers float to the top of mind:
1) When Eve took that bite of the Apple. Humanity is broken, sinful, and will ALWAYS fail in one way or another. There is no escape from ourselves.
2) The election of Woodrow Wilson and the elevation of Progressive politics. Progressivism was the first movement to meaningfully challenge (other than the Confederacy) the legitimacy and authority of the US Constitution. As each wave of Progressive "reform" of the Constitution has been implemented, the Rights of American citizens have been assaulted.
As for a bleak future, I concur, in the short term. Human history is not a straight line of positive evolution as Obama and other Progressives assert. Instead, human cultures ebb and flow. The fall of the highly advanced Roman culture was followed by about 500 years of the "dark ages!" But the Renaissance followed, and the human culture that subsequently developed exceeded that of the Roman world by many orders of magnitude.
The US always had an imperialist streak. See: Manifest Destiny and Mexican War. Also, our invasion of Canada in 1812. For a long while we were limited to our own neck of the woods . In the 20th century we started going global.
A betrayal of almost every principle. Although the Declaration does express support for revolution of the same sort everywhere in the world, a kind of premonition of "democracy promotion" driven by similar values worldwide. I think Franklin's vision was more modest than an eventual United States of the World. Or Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets.
Dont forget Progressive Education.
And the second revolt against the Crown. The same impulse to reject authority and do as you please.
It wasn't an apple in Eden though. Although LGBTQ aligned Apple Computer's logo is an apple with a bite out of it. The iPhone as the beginning of the knowledge of evil? Our goose is Tim Cook'ed.
I agree.
we can argue all day about when the decline of the US started, but it’s hard to ignore the high water mark around 9/11.
we had the entire world on our side and Bush and co. took that equity and destroyed it with WMD/Iraq lie. the world was never the same IMO...
9/11 and the Rise of the Neocons. I laugh when the ignorant youngsters say that Trump was the Worst President Evah. If only! And the US itself was never the same after 911 and the War on Terror. Obama had a chance to set things right but his admin just became Bush's 3rd and 4th terms instead.
Blowback, as Ron Paul among others accurately observed.
All Empires have a shelf life. America is on the decline. Much of the developing world sees China as the future.
China is getting old before it gets rich. It's unlikely to be "the" future either. The most likely outcome is a multi-polar world, the normal situation throughout history.
The empire might well be expanding while all these ills take place. Cruel empires often succeed for a time through evil. We're a sentimental people, sentimental, and evil, to borrow a phrase from Dostoyevsky.
Yes, Empires have a shelf life of about 500 years. Then, they collapse under the weight of their own hubris. Our "empire" is more specifically the Western post-Reformation cultural epoch.
I agree with JonF on this one. (Wow, pigs have flown, Jon!)
China will be old before it can become powerful. They'll be a challenge in the 20's and 30's, but the rest of 21st century belongs to someone slightly south of them. India.
Peoples who work hard to make and sell real things are ahead of the game in regards to those who rely on FIRE sales.
"On the video, thanks! Here was one comment that I found particularly hilarious, from The Classic Dad :
Let me tell you a story.... about a beer company founded in America, then sold to a corporate conglomerate in Europe. They didn't understand their market and tried forcing their woke beliefs on them. The people had enough and stopped buying their product. The company never admitted they screwed up, and the people remembered, continuing to boycott their beer. This wasn't just about beer, this was about people being fed up with being told what and how to think, this is the American spirit."
On the Trans thing:
Lordy!
On Gates's editorial:
Correctamundo! We are in a multi-polar world- Diplomatic discussions engineered by Xi between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Macron goes to China and he and Xi discuss co-op on nuclear energy, etc. (by the way, when PM Orban does anything that is in the national interest of Hungary, the EU and US intelligensia has a come apart. What's been the reaction to this?), etc.
I don't think Foggy Bottom has gotten the memo and instead they wag their finger at the rest of the world and increasingly the rest of the world gives US the finger.
P. S.- in addition to Hungarians being insulted about the 20 mil gift from Ms. Powers, implying there is no free press in Hungary, it would be nice if she addressed the insulted U. S. citizens on the issue of all those FISA warrant requests originating with her log-in details. Wow! Wouldn't that be a nice journalism story? Actually it would be nice if we didn't spend US money on such negative activities and instead worked on, oh, maybe clean water for East Palestine, Ohio.
All the CEO of Bud had to say was: "We understand that we alienated millions of our fellow Americans, many of whom are our customers. We're sorry we did that. Dylan Mulvaney has every right to live his life as he chooses, and we would love it if he drinks a Bud occasionally, but we made a mistake by making him an unofficial mascot of our company. Men are men. Women are women. We respect them both, but we can't do that without respecting the inherent differences between them. And we just fired the woman who made this disastrous decision."
That would have fixed this. He couldn't bring himself to do it.
Regarding American dysfunction, I've had people from both Serbia and Croatia tell me in the last 6 months that America feels like late-80s Yugoslavia, right before all hell broke loose.
The US is not at all like Yugoslavia, a nation stitched together out of six distinct ethnic groups some of whom had major historical grievances against each other. The closest thing to that in US would be the Europeans against the Native Americans, but there are not enough of the latter and they do not live in a separate region of their own, nor are they of one cultural or language group.
I think that's whistling past the graveyard. It's certainly true that America is not nearly as fractious as Yugoslavia. But the post-Civil Rights racial settlement, where we tried to be a color blind nation, has been destroyed by the Left, the fools.
I think you are myopic, Rod, if you cannot see how the alt-Right (and more broadly the "race-realist" right) has also worked to tear down the post-Civil Rights settlement. But it's my experience that there are simply not enough people passionate about these issues to create actual civil war: the overwhelming majority of us want the crazies, on both sides, to sit down and shut up. If anyone crosses the line into violence they will unite the populous in outrage against them, much as Tim McVeigh did. I think that your view is badly skewed by a selection effect: you hear very disproportionately from people who are among the crazies including the leftwingers who bash you mercilessly.
In the 1990's I blamed the Republican Party, under people like Newt Gingrich, of doing the very thing you are talking about, working to tear down the post-Civil Rights settlement. Of course, there were people on the left calling the whole post-Civil Rights settlement into question. But they were held in check by the more centrist Democrats, including people like Bill Clinton. I foolishly thought that Barack Obama would do the same. Instead, especially in his second term, he took a page from Gingrich, using race as a wedge issue to increase his political power.
I don't see how Obama used the race card. Claims about that are one more piece pf evidence that I live in a different timeline than some others here. I also don't think Gingrich, though an egotistical blow hard, was all that bad on the racial front.
Just Obama picking on that Cambridge MA in 2009 cop shows the sort of man he is. Like most on the Left, Obama hates everything about America pre-1960. I bet he especially enjoyed the statues of Lee, Jackson and Columbus getting torn down. Obama's a scoundrel.
Jon, in my very "blue" suburban DC school system, MLK-style "colorblindness" is considered insulting to non-white people. It's literally in the yearly HR trainings. Tell people "I treat everyone equally regardless of race" and you get sneered at and lectured about "equity." The tearing-down of the post civil rights settlement has been institutionalized in HR departments and school systems, and for all the alt-right's other faults, they're not the ones to blame for this.
Jonah,
I think you can make a case for means-tested benefits-- special help for people from low income strata and anyone devastated by unusual circumstances. Treating everyone absolutely equal in a completely "blind" way leads to "The law in its majesty forbids both the rich and poor from sleeping under bridges"
What?
I simply don’t know how I’m supposed to live with people who are okay with abortion access through birth and with the mutilation of kids as they go through the normal process of growing up, and find racism, sexism, and all the other kinds of isms under every rock and around every corner.
I’m tired of politicians who actively hate my country and her people and demand that I hate her and her history too.
It wasn’t a majority that fought the in Revolution and the Civil War. But enough people did organize and called out wrong.
It gives me a headache every time I read or listen to a Leftist these days because it’s just words that have no actual content in them - which the AB response was a perfect example of. It said stuff and there were a lot of words, but most of it is just meaningless, Like they are trying to come up with enough words to get the essay finished and meet the length requirement, so the teacher doesn’t mark them down. I was not impressed by the AB response at all. That’s what their entire statement sounded and felt like high school like to me.
We want to lay low, but even my husband (who’s not into guns) is talking about going to learn to shoot. I don’t care if it’s called ‘negative energy’ or just plain evil. Something bad is coming for America. 🙏🏻📿.
Hope you and your family have a blessed Easter season. He is risen! Hope you feel better too!
There are many people on the right like your father who never accepted the idea of a "color blind" country. My own father is another one. I grew up in Prince George's County MD in the bussing era fifty years ago. The cultural conflicts were enormous. Both racesd seethed at the other. Eventually, virtually all the whites left over a twenty-five year period. Most of Prince George's County is as black as 1960 Anacostia. Black and white cultures are radically different. That's life.
Never trust whistlers by the graveyard. They clearly are up to no good. I mean, I manage and walk in graveyards at all hours. I have strolled in grave yards sober and also wine-stewed at 2am, 4am...under a harvest moon. There is nothing to fear but mountain lions. ...Or psychopaths. The dead never, ever hurt you. Their mouldering bones are as content as a Boddhisatva, I assure you. Whistlers are mercenaries on the way to no good. I have encountered the midnight psychopaths and they are more worrisome than mountain lions. But I swear to you, i deal with them like Obie Wan. You just stay calm. Look at them confidently. Speak with a calm, steady voice and essentially say, “These are not the droids you are looking for”. Keep looking at them in the pause. And they walk. It also helps to be prepared for a knife fight.
I get asked quite frequently if I get scared spending so much time around the dead. My answer is simple and, strangely, catches people by surprise: “The dead are no worry to me. I can smell their status daily and occasionally have to handle their bones. But the so-called “living”...fear them.
Whistling that happy, sappy tune of nothing to see, all continues as it always has. I guess it is a way to preserve a sense of psychological equilibrium while the nation's cities crater.
It’s easy to be ‘color blind’ when you have an 85-90% dominant egalitarian ethnicity. I just don’t find it realistic that we were ever going to be a melting pot or salad; it’s simply not human nature.
To the degree that Yugoslavia was "stitched together," the "stitched-on" parts were Slovenia and Macedonia, which in the early 1990s had a quite minor war (Slovenia) and no war at all (Macedonia). The real bloodshed was in Croatia's Krajina region and in Bosnia, both of which had shared languages but had religiously diverse populations for centuries.
And you bafflingly ignored black-white relations when talking about America's historical grievances. Niccolo Soldo (not the Croat of my original post BTW) has said flat-out that his knowledge of Yugoslavia tells him the USA cannot survive something like the 1619 Project for reasons that should be obvious.
No, Croatia and Bosnia were originally part of Hungary) and had been for centuries.
Black-white relations in the US are not perfect, but they are better than in say 1950 - let alone in 1850.
Well, no, Bosnia certainly hadn't been part of Austria-Hungary for centuries, and Croatia had been independent before ever joining Hungary. Plus, talking about colonial background can be considered like saying Florida is still part of Spain or something.
And black-white relations are worse than they were in say 2005. Worth mentioning that the most diverse, sophisticated parts of Bosnia (Sarajevo and Mostar) saw the worst ethnic fighting.
Please read some histories. The medieval kings of Hungary became dukes of Croatia, which also included Bosnia back then.
Where's Bogdan Emil when we need him?
Re: And black-white relations are worse than they were in say 2005
I disagree. Get your nose out of the Internet and turn off Fox News-- go out in the real world and live.
Thank you kindly for the shout out, Jon, but technically the medieval Hungarian influence over Bosnia was very limited, unlike over Croatia, which was directly under the Magyar crown for most of its history. After Hungarian machinations failed, Bosnia was significantly influenced or ruled by Ottomans for about four hundred years, probably their defining historical experience, not neglecting the Serb presence.
Imo you are in a bubble that you cannot discern that anything happens if it’s not happening to you directly. Fox News has nothing to do with it.
Yay
I'm hearing the same thing from 2 sets of Uzbek / Soviet refugees from my church.
Does anybody ever turn down large sums of money? I was watching the other day, Broken Lance, one of those great sweeping 50s Cinematic Epic, with major stars and scene after scene of visual poetry. In one scene, the three villainous brothers offer the favorite son fresh out of prison $10,000 cash and a promise to financially back him for three years so he can make a new start in Oregon, far from their now dead father’s (Spencer Tracy) Empire-like Ranch. The favorite son refuses and tosses the bundled cash into a full spittoon from which another brother retrieves daintily retrieves it, soaked and dripping. I guess my underlying wish is to rejoin every financial decision we make with morality and ethics. I’m not arguing that it’s always wrong to accept financial support. I’m all for patrons, friends and families helping out, subsidies and charity. Even Ayn Rand, the outspoken theorist of !pure Capitalism’ kept all her money in a bank across the street and collected Social Security when she realized her medical expenses undergoing treatment for cancer could impoverish her. I am suggesting that it’s always as good a question as ‘where’s the money going?’ or ‘where should it go?’ is ‘where did the money come from?’ Same question about all the cheap ‘consumer’ goods that fill my shelves and closets as much as anyone’s. I would like to think that there’s at least a little of that jailbird brother (played by a very young Robert Wagner) in me. I’d like to think there’s a little of him in all of us. For me, at least, I wish it were more. I’m no fan of Harvard but I sure would have cheered if they had turned Ken Griffin down flat. They Right would have howled at the ‘virtue signaling’ but those of us who like Martin Luther King see the real division in our Politics as not Right or Left, but Populists and Plutocrats, would have chalked it up as a win. And, the spittoon would have been a nice touch.
Re: People overseas love a lot of things about the US, but they’re sick of our government being a woke bully.
Wokeness has nothing to do with it. They're sick of the US being a self-serving and self-righteous bully period. Something we've been since Teddie Roosevelt vowed to teach our neighbors to choose better leaders.
As for transhumanism, it might make good scifi in capable hands, but it's no more a reality, and won't be, than perpetual motion machines. We may do a lot with these bodies of ours, but we're not leaving them behind-- they are us.
Re: There are no strong grounds, which is why I am certain I will live to see legal polygamy in parts of America.
Maybe, but as I have said before it will come about because of religious liberty litigation by polygynous faiths (e..g, Islam). However: Number is basic category of reality while gender is not. I can imagine unisexual living things (we have those right here on Earth). I cannot imagine a reality where Number does not exist. Meanwhile I am constrained to remind everyone that SSM is a civil institution only: it does not pretend to trespass on marriage as a sacrament or ordinance of the Church. My own preference would still be to have "civil unions for all" leaving marriage to religion but giving the duties and rights part under the law to everyone.
And there is indeed (semi-)legal polygamy in a large group of (supposedly excommunicated) Mormon enclaves scattered throughout the West, from Western South Dakota through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and northern Arizona and Colorado. Been there for over a century. VERY religious: completely patriarchal, the women dress extremely modestly, strict morals (within the frame of polygamy). The twist is that most of the boys born to the colonies are booted out when they hit puberty, because the old men don't want any competition for themselves and their lineage for the girls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_fundamentalism#Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/who-are-the-new-owners-of-black-hills-fundamentalist-compound/#:~:text=PRINGLE%2C%20S.D.%20(KELO)%20%E2%80%94,Church%20of%20Latter%2DDay%20Saints.
https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/looking-back-polygamous-brothers-ties-to-south-dakota/
https://www.kwtx.com/2022/10/15/flds-mormon-girls-rescued-by-south-dakota-couple/
“ Meanwhile I am constrained to remind everyone that SSM is a civil institution only: it does not pretend to trespass on marriage as a sacrament or ordinance of the Church. My own preference would still be to have ‘civil unions for all’ leaving marriage to religion but giving the duties and rights part under the law to everyone.”
That was the solution in France, where it was considered bon ton to refer to the bride as “madamoiselle” until the church wedding. Just wait, J. Father Martin hasn’t broken a sweat yet.
C. S. Lewis (and I) agree with you. From "Mere Christianity":
The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question - how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammendans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.
"My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, and the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought be to quite sharp, so that a man know which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not."
But marriage is essential to a stable society and part of the problem with the mental health of young people are the consequences of divorce in so many of their lives. Marriage should be a priority of nations.
What about C. S. Lewis' quote opposes that?
Sorry I was trying to reply to Theodore
Yes, I realize you are one of the ROCA members who believe that while that church should not perform homosexual "marriages" itself, it ought to sacralize and bless them after.
Fran, I am not replying to you these days because I'd have better luck persuading my cats to become vegans. I don't need the frustration.
But I will call you out when you lie about me or my views. You are doing so above, without one scintilla of evidence. Stop it. Slander is the very name of the Devil!
It's rather presumptuous to say that I'm of the Devil, but understandable after your earlier rant that there's not a scintilla of Christian left in me.
Now all you have to do, is to affirm that you do NOT believe that the church should bless homosexual couplings. You've been coy about it, while making supportive allusions about that, as above. All you have to do is make the simple statement that the church should not bless homosexual relationships. Since you don't believe homosexual behavior is a sin, or if so, unimportant, then I don't expect you to be honest about this but remain in your closet and bide your time until it occurs. Don't evade, be honest and state your real opinion, instead of telling me I'm an incarnation of Satan.
This is why I am not replying to you: I do not need your harassment, as I have too much else going awry these days for this petty aggravation.
I have stated my beliefs many times on SSM and I do not need you to call me to make routine and rote protestations as if I stood before some Grand Inquisitor or Commissar of Ideological Conformity.
The word "Devil" derives from Greek "diabolē", slander, that is the connection I was pointing to.
You have been called out on this blog by other very devout and conservative Christians, not for the substance of your views, but for the ugly attitude with which you hammer them. Maybe some introspection on your part is in order.
"...remain in your closet..."
Lowlife even for you, Fran.
Really? So many like to have their cake and eat it too. Like wanting the Orthodox church to bless same sex couplings in opposition to 2000 years of church teaching, while not conducting the "marriage" ceremony itself. Imagine being lowlife for standing for truthfulness, in an age of living by lies. Don't be Woke, wake up.
Has Jon said such a thing? If so, I missed it. If he didn't say it, I owe you no apology.
See my comment below that C. S. Lewis (and I) agree with you regarding civil unions for all and religious marriages for those who mean it.
Wokeness absolutely has something to do with it. We've been exporting multi-culti P.C. claptrap along with democracy for years. Wokeness is simply a stronger variety of what we've already been shipping abroad.
Griffin could have made a huge impact by supporting AR (guv S H Sanders) school choice with prizes for best schools, and especially best schools for low IQ folk. This would be a great time for more Khan Academy self-study with frequent ai & human tests, and human teaching assistants & mentors.
Harvard illegally discriminates against hiring Republicans, professors or staff- the tax exempt status of all such orgs should be revoked.
"Think of what $300 million to create an institution that does what Rufo does"
Spend the money on recruiting and running conservative Republicans nationwide, who will have the best chance to attack the problem more directly by legislatively cleaning up the source of rot in existing institutions. It must be possible somehow, otherwise, you have surrendered Harvard and all the rest. Continuously facing that massive army, hoping to build a counter-army on a shoestring, this is not appealing for the future struggle. At least the state schools should be de-Nazified, to use an inconvenient term, which is inappropriate to the context, since this is a left-wing problem, but I can't help but notice yet again how "de-Communized" doesn't really exist as a trope. Obviously that's because in our collective practical experience, data says that Communists hang on to their jobs. For the the vast majority of those bastards life goes on as if nothing happened, even after things supposedly "change." This is a hard thing to swallow and digest. It's a trend that says something about the pervasiveness of liberalism, perhaps. Progress, motion, evolution, the soft totalitarianism of reason, all that is just the Machine oiling itself, and it has been doing so ever since we first picked up a rock and used it as a tool, or a weapon. (Notice how I'm assuming we're animals. My liberal framework is predisposed to seeing the Machine as human, not demonic. This is a problem, but the point is: solutions exist. My last line of defense: I'm literally multi-cultural.)
Anyway, make the built-in contradictions part and parcel of a renewed and quintessentially American, functionally progressive heroic self-definition, our next global mission: to finally change that shit. We're gonna show the planet how it's done. Let's set a tiny little huge example on how to march triumphantly into the future by firing the postmodernists and other theorists of permanent dissolution, by de-Communizing our institutions. You don't need to hang them in a Nuremberg.
I share in the upset in how Griffin and other uberrich give. I'm well off (NOT uberrich) and give more than the average Joe, and I am very picky about my giving. I have annoyed people and cut off organizations by so doing. (Small examples: I cut off World Vision and World Relief long ago and more recently cut off the Salvation Army when they decided to go woke.) I want to give where it does the most good with a minimum of evil. And if someone doesn't like it, too bad.
I'm not patting myself on the back because that is really what any responsible well-off person should be doing. So just dumping money on the likes of Harvard?? Come on!
Rod wonders why our current class of "uberrich" don't start their own foundations, as did Stanford, Getty, etc. I know the answer. They don't believe in anything sufficiently enough to merit that much of their attention. Jeff Bezos, for example, toys with the Washington Post in an effort to foist his political perspectives on the rest of us. Bezos just built an obscenely BIG yacht too. Call it dick swinging! At rock bottom however, there really isn't anything there....no meaningful objective beyond satisfying his own whims. Bill Gates has his Foundation of course, but it breaks no new ground in terms of philosophy, it simply lavishly funds existing philosophies--in furtherance of his whims.
This moment in history is almost entirely absent of new ideas. Progressives lavish praise on themselves for their rejection of religious Faith, but in that rejection, they have abandoned all sense of creativity.
The Griffin gift and others like it would be better used to assist poorer students at community colleges. Such funds would help these students complete their studies and develop the academic skills that would allow them to succeed in life (or, perhaps, attend a four-year institution). For many, community colleges are the gateway to a better future. More aid from the “billionaire class” could make this a reality for many more deserving students.
You're assuming he cares about those causes. Just because he's a republican donor now doesn't mean he cares about all aspects of the republican agenda. Donating to republicans helps advance some of his agenda as does donating to Harvard. These donations are transactional in nature, the number is massive but not meaningful to his overall wealth.
What ever happened to Black Lives Matter? Why not give the $300 million to historically black colleges, like Howard University?
Howard University began dissolving its (historically important) classics program in 2021. A conservative might want to spend his money somewhere else.
You remember the great line from "Witness", right? Col. Boris Bykov of Red Army Intelligence, to Whittaker Chambers, whose underground name is "Bob": "Siehst du, Bob, wer auszahlt is der Meister, und wer Geld nimmt muss auch etwas geben." ("Look, Bob, who pays out is the master, and whoever takes the money has to give something.") See what Jared Kushner's daddy got for his Geld? Await developments.
Can’t make a livin’ as a Bogeyman Wrangler if there ain’t no bogeymen. The worst nightmare of the Republican elite is a third party, not a strong and in-power Democrat Party. So why not fuel a Democrat making factory? You don’t get that rich being dumb. You can, though, and not be wise. Exhibit A.
Wise would have been to pump $300Million into vocal education. Electricians, welders, auto mechanics and HVAC techs are the bedrock of society. Their work is hard and good and in great demand. They don’t like paying taxes and they sure don’t tolerate bullshit. Their heads are usually down in their work and weekends but when something grabs their attention they act. (I figured making a fella switch beer brands would be harder, but then again, Lone Star hasn’t yet insulted my breed. Hope they never do.). This rich guy probably doesn’t even see them when he needs them but he’d miss them if they disappeared. And so would we.